Wright Lindsey Jennings
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Wright Lindsey Jennings successfully defended Cooling & Applied Technology, Inc. (CAT) in an inter partes review (IPR) proceeding before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) of the United States Patent and Trademark Office. In June 2014, CAT asserted U.S. Patent No. 6,397,622 (‘622 patent) in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas against its chief competitor in the poultry processing equipment manufacturing industry, Morris & Associates, Inc. The ‘622 patent covers an auger-type food product chiller used most frequently for cooling poultry at poultry processing plants. In response to the suit, Morris filed an IPR petition in December 2014 seeking to invalidate all of the claims of the ‘622 patent. CAT opposed the IPR petition and, on July 21, 2015, the PTAB denied the IPR petition on all four grounds raised by Morris. In denying Morris’s IPR petition, the PTAB accepted CAT’s arguments that Morris had failed to show a reasonable likelihood that any of the claims of the ‘622 patent were invalid.
CAT was defended in the IPR proceeding by WLJ partners, Richard Blakely Glasgow and J. Charles Dougherty.