Bancorp Services, L.L.C. v. Hartford Life Insurance Company

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• deciding that the specification supported the conclusion that the terms “stable value protected investment,” “surrender value protected investment,” and “SVP” were all equivalent
• holding that an inventor’s use of different terms to identify similar claim limitations should be construed to mean that the two claim terms have different meanings
• concluding that the district court erred in excluding testimony from a witness who was an expert in stable value investments but not in life insurance administration, where the abstract and title of the patent made clear that the patent related to both fields
• reversing summary judgment of invalidity for indeflniteness because the experts disagreed on whether a term was indefinite
• finding evidence not publicly available at the time of the invention may nonetheless be probative to show that the term was in use and had a discernible meaning to at least some persons practicing in the field
• “the use of both terms in close proximity in the same claim gives rise to an inference that a different meaning should be assigned to each”

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).