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WASHINGTON, D.C. — A Texas federal judge should have approved Magēmā Technology LLC’s request for a new trial in a patent infringement suit it brought against Phillips 66 and related entities, a panel in the Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals held Sept. 8; the panel said it could not be certain if an improperly introduced theory from Phillips informed a jury’s verdict in its favor.
RICHMOND, Va. — Nineteen states and the District of Columbia lack standing under Article III of the U.S. Constitution to sue over the firing of probationary federal workers en masse, a divided Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel ruled Sept. 8, vacating a trial court’s preliminary injunction and remanding with instruction that the case be dismissed.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) failed to fully consider the indefiniteness and abstractness of an inventor’s proposed patent describing a system for distributing content between online users, a panel in the Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals held in a nonprecedential judgment, vacating part of PTAB’s findings and reversing other aspects.
NEW YORK — A New York justice on Sept. 8 granted the Archdiocese of New York’s motion for partial summary judgment against London Market Insurers (LMI) in the archdioces’s coverage dispute arising from close to 1,700 underlying sexual abuse lawsuits, declaring that LMI must pay its solvent shares of its full policy limit of $200,000 per covered occurrence from May 1, 1975, to May 14, 1978, and $300,000 per covered occurrence from May 15, 1978, to Sept. 1, 1978, in excess of the policy’s $100,000-per-occurrence retention.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A divided U.S. Supreme Court on Sept. 8 granted the federal government’s application to stay pending appeal a trial court’s July halt of “Operation At Large” being carried out in Los Angeles by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents and officers and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel who detain individuals in publicly accessible places to question their legal status based on the location, type of work being done, language being spoken, accent and race or ethnicity.
CINCINNATI — The Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals refused to force a district court judge to recuse himself from all pending and future proceedings involving certain pharmacy benefits managers (PBMs) and to order the disclosure of ex parte communications, denying a writ of mandamus petition that was filed by the PBMs.
MILWAUKEE — The Wisconsin Supreme Court on Sept. 8 heard oral arguments on whether a brewery can be held liable as a premises owner for asbestos exposures experienced by an independent contractor under Wisconsin law and whether if the verdict stands, punitive damages are based on the entire compensatory damages award or just the portion recoverable by the plaintiff.
HARTFORD, Conn. — In an opinion scheduled for official release on Sept. 9, a majority of the Connecticut Supreme Court held that an insurance broker did not have a duty to inform insureds that their homeowners insurer did not intend to renew their insurance policy and rejected the insureds’ argument that their long-standing and special relationship with the broker created a legal duty requiring it to provide them with notice of the insurer’s nonrenewal.
AUSTIN, Texas — In its Sept. 5 orders pronounced, the Texas Supreme Court denied an insurer’s petition asking it to review an appeals court’s ruling that affirmed a lower court’s grant of summary judgment in favor of a hotel owner insured in a coverage dispute over roof damage caused by a storm.
SAN FRANCISCO — Anthropic PBC has agreed to pay no less than $1.5 billion to resolve claims it improperly pirated nearly half a million books while obtaining data for use in training its Claude artificial intelligence, a class of authors says in a Sept. 5 motion for preliminary settlement approval.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A trial court’s summary judgment ruling for Rebecca Slaughter, one of two Federal Trade Commission commissioners purportedly removed in March from the Federal Trade Commission without cause, was administratively stayed by U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. on Sept. 8 pending further order by the high court.