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Welcome to Federal Circuitry

Federal Circuitry is a data-driven Federal Circuit blog. Our Federal Circuit Statistics empirically analyze quantifiable aspects of the Court. Our En Banc Tracker highlights pending and past petitions. Our Substantive Order Tracker allows you to search less-discussed orders. Check back weekly for Last Week in the Federal Circuit and monthly for our Oral Argument Recap.

Follow us on Twitter @Fed_Circuitry and check out our sister blog, Left Coast Appeals, to keep tabs on the Ninth Circuit.

April 26, 2021 - Last Week in the Federal Circuit
Last Week in the Federal Circuit (April 19-23): Contingent Findings v. Alternative Holdings
By: Eric W. Lin
As many of you probably saw, Chief Judge Prost’s tenure as Chief Judge of the Federal Circuit is coming to a close, with Judge Moore set to become the new Chief Judge on May 22. But the upcoming transition doesn’t seem to have slowed
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April 22, 2021 - Federal Circuit Insights
Revisiting Cancelled Oral Arguments
By: Brian R. Matsui
It has been a little while since we took a look at what—from a statistics standpoint—went down at recent oral arguments (see last post here ). Since the Federal Circuit went remote, there was an initial wave of a high percentage of appeals that
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April 19, 2021 - Last Week in the Federal Circuit
Last Week in the Federal Circuit (April 12-16): Self-Enabling Prior Art
By: Stephen Liu
It was a busy week for the Federal Circuit, with a total of 18 new opinions, including a precedential opinion on enablement in the context of § 103 obviousness references. Below we provide our usual weekly statistics and our case of the week—our highly
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April 13, 2021 - Last Week in the Federal Circuit
Last Week in the Federal Circuit (April 5-9): Failure to Authenticate Third-Party Source Code
Last week was argument week, which sometimes means lots of Rule 36 affirmances and not a lot of precedential opinions. Still, that didn’t stop the Court from issuing an interesting, and relatively rare, precedential decision on evidence admissibility. Below we provide our usual weekly
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April 08, 2021 - Federal Circuit Insights
Will Your Appeal Have Argument Soon?
By: Brian R. Matsui
There’s a perception in the Federal Circuit bar that that Court has been scheduling cases for oral argument a bit quicker recently. Now, on some levels, it’s all relative—the Federal Circuit has always been pretty quick in getting cases to argument ( see our
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April 05, 2021 - Last Week in the Federal Circuit
Last Week in the Federal Circuit (March 29-April 2): A POSA By Any Other Name …
In a slow week, the Federal Circuit nevertheless gave patent litigators everywhere a non-precedential opinion to nibble on about the definition of the ever-present person having ordinary skill in the art. Below we provide our usual weekly statistics and our case of the week—our
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March 31, 2021 - Federal Circuit Insights
Rehearing revisited: Do some judges CFR more often than others?
By: Brian R. Matsui and Seth W. Lloyd
In a recent post, we took a look at data on rehearing petitions—specifically, the timing of calls for responses (CFRs). Today, we dig further into that data to see if we can identify judges whose panels CFR more often. As you may remember, for
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March 29, 2021 - Last Week in the Federal Circuit
Last Week in the Federal Circuit (March 22-26): Improving A Technological Process Or Merely Enhancing An Ineligible Concept
By: Seth W. Lloyd
Spring seems to have arrived in DC, and cherry blossom trees are starting to bloom all over the region. But the beautiful weather this weekend didn’t stop us from our weekly review of all things Federal Circuit. Below we provide our usual weekly statistics
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March 25, 2021 - Federal Circuit Insights
When Do Federal Circuit Judges Sit?
By: Seth W. Lloyd
A couple weeks ago we wrote about how often Federal Circuit judges sit in a given year ( see How Often Do Federal Circuit Judges Sit? ). Spoiler: they sit a lot. In that post, though, we looked at the data for each judge
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March 22, 2021 - Last Week in the Federal Circuit
Last Week in the Federal Circuit (March 15-19): Compensation Conflict
The Federal Circuit followed last week’s busy week with a slower one, issuing ten total decisions. In one of its two precedential opinions, the Court took on a circuit split over overtime compensation. Below we provide our usual weekly statistics and our case of
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