Octane Fitness v. Icon Health and Fitness, one of two highly anticipated patent rulings issued by the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday, doesn’t just make it easier for judges to award attorney fees to the prevailing party in infringement cases. It also vindicates a startup company’s decision to stick with a lawyer who’d never before set foot inside the high court.
Octane gave the justices an opportunity to put their own gloss on a section of the Patent Act mandating that fee-shifting should only occur in “exceptional cases.” In a unanimous decision, they wrote that “an ‘exceptional’ case is simply one that stands out from others with respect to the substantive strength of a party’s litigating position or the unreasonable manner in which the case was litigated.”
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