Partner Nate Kelley was quoted in the Law360* article, "Fed. Circ. Pleads for Patent Eligibility Clarity: What Now?," regarding the lack of clarity on whether the Federal Circuit's patent eligibility decision on an Athena Diagnostics test for an autoimmune disease is under high court precedent.

"It's certainly a motivation for people going to Congress and people going to the Supreme Court. It's not going to calm things down, that's for sure," said Nate, former U.S. Patent and Trademark Office solicitor.

"Yet congressional action comes with risks," Nate said, "since a new law is going to require the Federal Circuit to spend years interpreting and applying it to determine what passes muster. The danger is that if Congress writes a law, then we're going to have go through the motions of figuring out what the law means through case after case after case."

Those opinions are "both about actual concrete problems with Supreme Court case law as it exists today, and the Federal Circuit's inability to resolve that,” Nate said. “I think that's the kind of thing that could actually move the Supreme Court to take a case.”

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