24 February 2015Patents

Sanction-threatened Foley lawyer makes plea with US Supreme Court

A lawyer who has been threatened with a sanction from the US Supreme Court for filing an unorthodox petition has responded by proxy to the court, claiming that the bulk of the document was written by his client.

The case concerns patent attorney Howard Shipley, a partner at law firm Foley & Lardner. Shipley filed a petition on behalf of his client Sigram Schindler, who sought to overrule a decision by the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit that stopped him patenting an invention covering artificial intelligence.

It has been claimed that the petition was unclear and that too much of its content was written by the client.

Paul Clement, a partner at law firm Bancroft and who responded to the threat of a sanction on Shipley’s behalf last Thursday (February 19), insisted that the Washington, DC-based lawyer had acted “in good faith”.

Shipley had to “reconcile the competing demands of the duty of loyalty that he owed his client and the duty that he owed [the Supreme] court,” Clement’s response said.

He added that the client had “deeply held views” about patent law and “insisted” upon articulating his basic argument, which he had done in amicus briefs filed with the court.

“The result is an unorthodox petition that clearly and faithfully reflects the views of the client, right down to the client’s favoured locutions and acronyms employed in his other writings about the patent system,” Clement said in the response, adding that Shipley would not have filed such a petition for a “more deferential client”.

If Shipley had withdrawn from the representation, he may have prejudiced his client’s ability to pursue the last legal option available to save his patent from invalidation, Clement added.

According to the Scotusblog, Clement has found in his research that the Supreme Court has directly punished just one lawyer in the last 50 years.

Shipley did not respond to a request for comment. Schindler could not be reached for comment.

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Patents
24 March 2015   A lawyer who faced a possible sanction from the US Supreme Court for submitting a petition to the court that was allegedly not written in “plain terms” has escaped punishment.