Revised AIPLA Model Patent Jury Instructions

The 2005 revision of the American Intellectual Property Law Association's Model Patent Jury Instructions are now publicly available on the AIPLA web site, here.

The original work was drafted in July of 1997 by Model Patent Jury Instruction Subcommittee of AIPLA’s Federal Litigation Committee with the objective of resisting any bias for either patent owners or accused infringers. In January 2004, the Patent Litigation Committee of the American Intellectual Property Association undertook the task of updating the 1997 version of the association's model jury instructions. One goal of the project was to update the 1997 version of the association's model jury instructions. Researchers were told to limit their examination of the case law through the end of September 2005. Thus, these instructions should only be considered in the context of this timeframe.

Another goal was to simplify and shorten the instructions. In meeting that goal, the subcommittee hoped to produce a set of jury instructions that would be useful for a typical patent case, rather than a set that covered every conceivable situation that might arise. As a result, some of the less-used instructions from the 1997 version were removed. Those removed instructions could be appropriate in a particular case, if they still reflect the current law.

Finally, stylistic changes were made for readability and consistency. For instance, bracketed terminology was made consistent to allow the use of "find and replace" features in today's word processing programs. The instructions now can easily be tailored to a particular case by quickly substituting the bracketed term with the custom term for the case. For example, all instances of the term "[full patent number]" can be replaced with "U.S. Patent No. 4,045,901" using a word processor's "find and replace" feature. This enhancement to the model jury instructions should make them much easier to use during trial.