One of the nice personality traits of the judges of the Federal Circuit is that they have\u00a0healthy senses of humor.\u00a0 Judge Plager’s\u00a0rather wry\u00a0sense of humor demonstrated itself in two recent oral arguments.<\/p>\n
In the oral argument for\u00a0IN RE ELECTRO-MECHANICAL INDUSTRIES<\/span>, 2008-1530, (Fed. Cir. Dec. 22, 2009), the court was trying to determine why the district court judge had increased the award of attorneys’ fees in a bankruptcy estimation proceeding.\u00a0 Judges Moore and Plager were intently discussing with plaintiff’s counsel the Lodestar analysis for contingency cases and inquiring about his reaction\u00a0at the time that\u00a0the district court judge significantly enhanced the attorneys’ fee award.\u00a0 As you’ll hear, Judge Plager then asked “I bet you had a party, didn’t you?”\u00a0[Listen<\/a>].\u00a0\u00a0 For the record, I’m pretty sure that whether one had a\u00a0party is not the current\u00a0standard of review\u00a0of a\u00a0Lodestar\u00a0analysis.<\/p>\n In the oral argument of another recent case, In re Medicis Pharmaceutical Corporation<\/span>, 2009-1291, (Fed. Cir. Dec. 14, 2009), the Associate Solictor for the PTO made a conscientious effort during oral argument\u00a0to correct a statement that was in his brief.\u00a0 Judge Plager’s tongue-in-cheek remark was “Which raises the question ‘Were you lying then, or are you lying now?’ ” [Listen<\/a>].<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One of the nice personality traits of the judges of the Federal Circuit is that they have\u00a0healthy senses of humor.\u00a0 Judge Plager’s\u00a0rather wry\u00a0sense of humor demonstrated itself in two recent oral arguments. In the oral argument for\u00a0IN RE ELECTRO-MECHANICAL INDUSTRIES, 2008-1530, (Fed. Cir. Dec. 22, 2009), the court was trying to determine why the district […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.717madisonplace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1442"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.717madisonplace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.717madisonplace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.717madisonplace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.717madisonplace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1442"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/www.717madisonplace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1442\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1466,"href":"https:\/\/www.717madisonplace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1442\/revisions\/1466"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.717madisonplace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.717madisonplace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.717madisonplace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}