As the U.S. International Trade Commission has evolved from a little-used venue to settle intellectual property disputes into a popular forum, Fish & Richardson principal Michael McKeon has been in the middle of developments.
McKeon, who has worked on more than 30 cases concerning Section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930 before the ITC, said the commission only handled about a half-dozen such cases per year when he started litigating there during the mid-1990s. Now, the ITC decides dozens of Section 337 cases in which the main remedy available is an exclusion order that instructs U.S. Customs and Border Protection to keep foreign products that infringe on American patents from entering the United States.
