Intellectual Property – patents — attorney fees

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U.S. Supreme Court

Civil

Intellectual Property – patents — attorney fees

The Brooks Furniture framework is unduly rigid and impermissibly encumbers the statutory grant of discretion to district courts.

Brooks Furniture is too restrictive in defining the two categories of cases in which fee awards are allowed. The first category — cases involving litigation or certain other misconductv—vappears to extend largely to independently sanctionable conduct. But that is not the appropriate benchmark. A district court may award fees in the rare case in which a party’s unreasonable, though not independently sanctionable, conduct is so “exceptional” as to justify an award. For litigation to fall within the second category, a district court must determine that the litigation is both objectively baseless and brought in subjective bad faith. But a case presenting either subjective bad faith or exceptionally meritless claims may sufficiently set itself a part from mine-run cases to be “exceptional.” The Federal Circuit imported this second category from Professional Real Estate Investors, Inc. v. Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc., 508 U. S. 49, but that case’s standard finds no roots in §285’s text and makes little sense in the context of the exceptional-case determination.

496 Fed. Appx. 57, reversed and remanded.

12-1184 Octane Fitness, LLC, v. Icon Health & Fitness, Inc.

Sotomayor, J.