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New Patent Reform Proposal Focuses on Education
CNet is reporting that a new proposal before Congress is attempting to increase the number of federal judges who specialize in patent litigation. From the article: "The proposal prescribes $5 million each year in federal funding over the next decade for "educational and professional development" programs for designated judges and to pay the salaries of new, specially appointed clerks with patent expertise. Under the bill, patent cases would continue to be randomly assigned to judges, but with a notable exception. Any judge who practices within a court district offering the pilot program but who chooses not to sign up for the extra training would have the option of transferring patent cases to a program participant." Techdirt also has a short writeup on why this specialization might not necessarily be a good thing.
The CAFC has led to more widespread patenting, both in terms of raw numbers of patents and in subject matter -- we went from Flook and Diehr to having all software be patentable, for example. And yet the reversal rate on appeal is still 50%.
Patent litigation has grown from a specialist niche, a side job of patent prosecution boutiques, into one of the very few areas of law where billing is practically unlimited. Good, cheap firms like Finnegan bill $4m for a case, good, expensive firms like Weil bill four times that much, and god only knows what the crappy firms are billing -- usually somewhere in the middle. Every law firm wants to chase these fees, for rather obvious reasons.
There's really no way for clients to know who they should hire. The big firms that do an adequate job with corporate work, which the GCs are familiar with, have zero experience with patent litigation. The clients can't even get a reliable estimate of cost, because they don't know if the prospective firm is lowballing because they're lying, lowballing because the prospective firm doesn't know what they're doing, or giving an accurate estimate. And if the client does end up losing, as half of them by definition must, the GC would rather tell the CEO and board of directors that they did the best they could, because they hired a big (in truth mediocre) firm with a recognized name than some hotshot litigation boutique in Palo Alto.
The number of patent cases has gone up -- just look at the size of the USPQ volumes over the last few decades. And of course the size of patent verdicts and settlements has gone up too.
While the law is in some sense more uniform, the decisions certainly aren't, and given the other changes I don't see how you can say this is an improvement.
With great power comes great fan noise.
You appear to be confusing criminal court matters (Crown court) with civil court matters (Queens bench division). Different set of judges, don't tar them all with the same brush!