The key to a critical strategy is having a vision for how you are going to win the war, even if you lose individual battles. By adding the U.S. Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) judges to District Court to the jury, a client has three independent shots at winning.

The objective is to build a strategy that's more than the sum of its parts. It needs to be something aimed at a result that your client really needs. If an attorney designs a client's strategy so that it's failure tolerant -- that it has a layered defense -- then the client is going to benefit enormously from your seamless representation between the district court litigation and the PTAB representation.

There are a lot of landmines out there for people who are not careful about coordinating what they're saying in the courtroom and what they're saying in the boardroom. If there's a sliver of daylight between your litigation positions and your board positions, it's like Christmas for the other side.

Originally published May 6, 2014

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