Supreme Court Decides Gunn v. Minton Patent Legal Malpractice Case – State Court It Is

Authored by Henry M. Sneath, Esq.  – Chair of the Intellectual Property Practice Group at Picadio Sneath Miller & Norton, P.C. , Pittsburgh, Pa.

Today – The US Supreme Court in Gunn v. Minton decided that a patent legal malpractice case is properly brought in state court. The court held that even though the “case within a case” standard would require interpretation of a patent and other typically Federal Issues, that “case within a case” is a hypothetical case, that does not need to be in Federal Court.  Further the court wrote:

“Because of the backward-looking nature of a legal malpractice claim, the question is posed in a merely hypothetical sense: If Minton’s lawyers had raised a timely experimental-use argument, would the result in the patent infringement proceeding have been different? No matter how the state courts resolve that hypothetical “case with a case,” it will not change the real-world result of the prior federal patent litigation. Minton’s patent will remain invalid.

Nor will allowing state courts to resolve these cases undermine “the development of a uniform body of [patent] law. … Congress ensured such uniformity by vesting exclusive jurisdiction over actual patent cases in the federal district courts and exclusive appellate jurisdiction in the Federal Circuit. … In resolving the non-hypothetical patent questions those cases present, the federal courts are of course not bound by state court case-within-a-case patent rulings. … In any event, the state court case-within-a-case inquiry asks what would have happened in the prior federal proceeding if a particular argument had been made. In answering that question, state courts can be expected to hew closely to the pertinent federal precedents. It is those precedents, after all, that would have applied had the argument been made.”

We previously reported on this case and will follow for any interesting cases which actually try one of these malpractice cases in state court. Here is the opinion delivered by Chief Justice Roberts: http://tinyurl.com/a474okm