ECI Innovations, LLC, a company that designs and licenses financial products, is seeking an experienced intellectual property professional to join the company as a Partner on a part-time, permanent basis. This is a remote opportunity. The successful candidate will assist with filing patents for a proprietary financial benchmark product and provide legal guidance related to licensing the company’s intellectual property. Due to the confidential nature of the project, additional details will be shared with qualified candidates.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) today published a Federal Register Notice proposing to amend the rules of practice to require that third-party requests for ex parte reexamination of a patent must include a statement identifying all real-parties-in-interest (RPIs) to the proceeding. According to the proposed rule, statements identifying RPIs would be kept confidential upon request and “would provide the Office with a mechanism to evaluate statutory estoppel provisions” as well as “enhance the Office’s ability to respond to false certifications, misrepresentations, and fraud.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in Comet Technologies USA, Inc. v. XP Power, LLC, overturned Comet Technologies’ $40 million trade secret verdict against XP Power and ordered a new trial, finding that the district court erroneously instructed the jury that the defendant bore the burden of proving that Comet’s trade secrets were readily ascertainable by proper means. The court held that the error was not harmless because the instructions were not accurate as a whole, and nothing in the jury’s verdict shed light on how it would have ruled under a correct instruction. The case is notable both for clarifying what “readily ascertainable” means and for spotlighting a burden-of-proof distinction between the Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA) and the California Uniform Trade Secrets Act (CUTSA) that practitioners should not overlook.