When lawyers for Life Technologies Corp. filed a cert petition with the U.S. Supreme Court in its patent case in June 2015, they included the fact that the client company was “an indirect wholly-owned subsidiary of Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc.”

The high court granted cert a year later, and when veteran advocate Carter Phillips of Sidley Austin filed the merits brief in September 2016, he dutifully supplied the same parent-company information again, as required by the court’s Rule 29.6.