About The Project

Chief Judge Paul R. Michel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit requested the members of this National Jury Instruction Project to develop a set of model jury instructions for patent infringement cases. The goal was to create a committee, national in scope, with members from both the bench and bar. The underlying idea was to benefit from the collective experience of both judges and attorneys who are interested in creating an easier to understand and streamlined set of model jury instructions. 

The following instructions are the result of the project. These instructions have not been endorsed by the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals and are not intended to be “official” jury instructions. Nor is any particular member of this Committee endorsing any particular instruction. These instructions are intended to be helpful models for judges and lawyers. In devising this set of instructions, we have looked to and drawn from the work of others, including the committees for the Northern District of California, The Federal Circuit Bar Association, the AIPLA, and the District of Delaware. We have also benefited tremendously from extensive comments we received during the public comment period from a diverse and large number of contributors. These contributors have included individual federal judges, inventors, attorneys, law firms, corporations, bar groups and trade associations. Special thanks to the American Bar Association Section of Intellectual Property Law, Federal Circuit Bar Association and Intellectual Property Owners Association for their comment sets.

Judges and lawyers who use these instructions will need to supplement them with instructions that speak generally to the trial and the jury’s duties, such as the nature of the evidence and the duty to deliberate. In addition, this set of model instructions, like all model instructions, will have to be tailored to the facts and issues of the particular case. When particular legal issues are implicated by the circumstances of a particular case, additions to the instructions should be considered and may well be warranted. This set of instructions is intended to be a helpful starting point for the development of a jury charge.

We thank Ed Good, Writer-in-Residence at Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner, LLP, for comments and suggestions on style and substance.

These instructions will be timely updated to incorporate developments in the law. If you have comments, corrections, or suggested changes, please send them to:
PatentJuryInstructions@gmail.com