This is Part 4 of our series analyzing Federal Court decision turnaround times. Readers should consult Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 before this one. In this part, I revisit an idea that was mentioned briefly in earlier editions: how to measure judges’ workloads in comparison to decision-writing time. We will be looking at cases under reserve (judges’ queue of pending cases) at the Court to see how they may affect wait times experienced by litigants. All data sources and caveats remain the same as before unless otherwise noted. Querying the queue When we previously discussed judicial workloads (Part…
This is Part 3 of an ongoing series examining publicly available data on Federal Court decision turnaround times. Readers should look at Part 1 and Part 2 before this one. This article focuses on decision complexity. Several readers have inquired about the perceived differences in judges’ dockets and workloads. In particular, there is a feeling that certain judges (particularly in IP) have been assigned more complex cases than others, which may explain potentially longer average writing times and inter-judge variability. The idea that there are cases of differing complexity is intuitive – we should expect that cases have varying degrees…
This is Part 2 of my series analyzing decision turnaround times at the Federal Court. See Part 1 here. In Part 1, I explored the general distributions and trends of decision turnaround time (the number of days between hearing and decision) at the Federal Court. This article will examine practice areas at the Federal Court. I aim to analyze how of subject-matter assignment to judges affects and factors into judicial workload and efficiency. Data from the Federal Court can be divided by subject matter. This lets us ask whether practice area correlates with decision-making time. For example, which areas are…
Over the past few years, there have been discussions among the IP bar in Canada about the length of time that some decisions have been under reserve. During the Federal Courts’ Town Hall at last year’s CBA IP Day, a question was raised to the Chief Justice about whether steps were being taken to address perceived delays in judgment time. Among the answers given was that there was insufficient publicly available data about how long judgments were taking and how to evaluate delays, if any. The bar was encouraged to provide further feedback and to organize in collecting data. This…
It’s not often that we get four(!) appellate decisions on one specific legal doctrine in less than a year. But here we are with four decisions from the Federal Court of Appeal on inducement of infringement: In all four cases, the patentee was successful in arguing that the defendant indirectly infringed by inducement. This is striking, for reasons mentioned below, but mostly because it had for many years always been said (including in these very judgments!) that inducement was a difficult test to meet. Yet, upon a close inspection of these judgments, it seems clear that the landscape has materially…
Canada (Attorney General) v Benjamin Moore & Co, 2023 FCA 168, was a much-awaited decision of the Federal Court of Appeal that was supposed to address the long-standing détente between the Canadian patent office and the bulk of the patent prosecution bar regarding the eligibility of computer-implemented inventions. Spoiler alert: it did not. There is a lot to unpack in this long-standing issue (a subject ripe for a paper). I spoke about it at last year’s University of Toronto Patent Colloquium following the Federal Court’s first instance decision in Benjamin Moore, and it was a topic that seemed to pick…
The Supreme Court of Canada recently dismissed Apotex’s leave to appeal its long-running Statute of Monopolies claim against Eli Lilly. The Court’s refusal to grant leave means that, for all intents and purposes, the chapter has closed on this intriguing legal theory.