Aftermath Of Poor Patent Drafting: A Series – Part II

Authors: Priya and Amit Koshal

In our previous blog Aftermath of Poor Patent Drafting: A series (Part I), we discussed the common errors seen in patent drafting. In today's blog, let us understand what the consequences of such errors with the help of some relevant case laws.

Consequences of errors in drafting

When we discuss the importance of carefully drafting a patent application and the relevance of every single term used in the same, it is imperative that we address the case of Chef America, Inc. v. Lamb-Weston, Inc, 358 F.3d 1371 (Fed. Cir. 2004). In this case, while deciding against the claim for infringement, the court basically came down to critically analysing the usage of "To" vs "At". In this case, the applicant attempted to protect a cooking step for heating a dough at a certain temperature inside an oven. But in its patent application, the applicant drafted the claim to read "heating the . . . dough to a temperature in the range of about 400