How Changes To U.S. Civil Procedure Rules Will Affect Patent Litigation

Changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, due to go into effect in December 2015, will change the scope of discovery, the timing of document requests, and the rules for responding to document requests. These changes, the first overhaul to the standards for producing documents since 2006, stand to impact litigants throughout the federal court system. But patent practitioners used to broad-ranging document requests may feel its impact most acutely. In this article, Finnegan attorneys  Jeffrey C. Totten and  Robert C. MacKichan discuss the proposed changes to the Federal Rules, the reasons for the changes described in the advisory committee notes, and the projected impact on patent litigation.