Besides being just crummy all around, 2020 wasn’t a particularly eventful year for intellectual property.
The Supreme Court decided six cases of relatively minor consequence. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit didn’t rock the patent bar the way it did with 2019′s Arthrex decision. Jury trials were few and far between after February. The Eastern District of Texas reopened in the summer for a handful of trials, including two $500 million patent verdicts against Apple Inc., then closed again following a courtroom COVID-19 outbreak in November. We had a smattering of fully virtual bench trials in patent cases, including one that ended in a $1.9 billion award.
