Federal Circuit Abandons "Dictionary-First" Rule of Claim Construction

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has now issued its long expected en banc decision, touching on most of the issues identified by the Court in its en banc order but expressly declining to address whether it should accord any deference to trial court claim construction rulings. Phillips v. AWH Corp., Case Nos. 03-1269, -1286 (Fed. Cir. July 12, 2005) (en banc) (Bryson, J.) (Mayar, J. dissenting).

The majority opinion provides a useful, going-forward overview of claim construction protocols and canons of construction as well as a clear retreat from the Texas Digital "dictionary-first" approach to claim construction that has permeated many recent cases. The Phillips decision heralds a return to the intrinsic/extrinsic hierarchal evidence approach of Vitronics v. Conceptronic (1996) and the line of cases that followed. In Vitronics, the Federal Circuit set out a hierarchal framework for claim construction in which one starts with the intrinsic evidence, i.e. the claims,