The Day I Woke Up
and Become a Patent
Lawyer … Briefly
(And got away with it)
Since 1986, as an attorney for pile driving companies, I’ve
been lucky – very lucky. As a young child I wanted to be a
bridge engineer, then, presto, after working construction
through school and becoming a lawyer, I got to work for bridge
builders, visit deep shoring sites, watch piling in action from near
the operator’s seat and meet the men and women who make the
profession great.
I thought I had seen it all. Crazy cases, deep differing site conditions,
wild witnesses, fist fights on jobs, bonding, barton choker
discussions at foremen’s meetings, overhead load OSHA issues,
cranes cartwheeling into the Bay – everything under the sun. But
not patents. In fact, I did not even know there were patents in pile
foundation work. I figured it was all “back of the napkin” sketches,
one welder, one torch, maybe even one beer, and presto, a pile tip
created out in the corporate yard, and a story to tell.
Not so. I was way wrong. A rookie. So here is my story – a foray
into patent litigation.
CONSTRUCTION LAW
It turns out that I knew nothing about patents, patent law, patent
litigation, patent court, patent vocabulary – they all may well
have been patent leather shoes. Yet, I had written the denial letter
to the patent infringement claim some eight years before – why not?
I believed I understood the engineering and mechanics, and had
the patent holders and senior engineers in the field watching my
back. This takes us to the case that got a lot of airplay in last fall’s
patent blogs…
Neville v. Foundation Constuctors, Inc. – Trial court
and court of appeal rulings on pile tip patents
In the case, Neville v. Foundation Constructors, Inc., we (the defendants)
won, at the federal trial court in Santa Ana by Summary
Judgment and again at the Court of Appeal in Washington, D.C.
Since then, about four patent blog articles have appeared, and
each one is worth a read for those either needing something to
put them to sleep, or to learn the curious patent law vocabulary
By Mark J. Rice, Esq., McNeil, Silveira, Rice & Wiley
Illustration: iqoncept/123RF Photo courtesy of Mark Rice
www.piledrivers.org PILEDRIVER | 99
/www.piledrivers.org
