Form 18: Goodbye (And Good Riddance?)

With the amendment to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure going into effect on December 1, 2015 (absent an act of Congress to the contrary), Rule 84 and all of the accepted forms that go with it –including Form 18 for patent complaints – will be abrogated.  As many of you know and have experienced, Form 18 suggests that little more than an identification of the patent(s)-in-suit and a general assertion that the defendant infringes is sufficient to support a claim for patent infringement.  Form 18 has served as an effective shield against the heightened pleadings standards set forth in the Supreme Court's decisions in Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly and Ashcroft v. Iqbal, as the Federal Circuit acknowledged in K-Tech Telecommunications, Inc. v. Time Warner Cable, Inc., 714 F.3d 1277 (Fed. Cir. 2013).