Last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued an opinion in Vascular Sols. LLC v. Medtronic, Inc, No. 2024-1398 (Sept. 9, 2024), vacating the District Court for the District of Minnesota’s claim construction ruling that Vascular Solutions’ patents were invalid for indefiniteness.
Vascular Solutions sued Medtronic in 2019, alleging that Medtronic infringed forty claims across seven patents: U.S. Patent Nos. 8,048,032; 8,142,413; RE45,380; RE45,760; RE45,776; RE46,116; and RE47,379. The district court conducted claim construction proceedings across ten of the asserted claims, seeking to construe the term “substantially rigid portion/segment.” In doing so, the court divided the claims into two mutually exclusive groups based on their descriptions of the “substantially rigid portion.” Medtronic asked the court to find the claim term indefinite because Vascular Solutions’ construction would cause the same device to simultaneously infringe both groups, which the court had held were mutually exclusive. The district court agreed, finding all of the claims indefinite.
The Federal Circuit reversed, explaining that the district court erred by determining that the two groups of claims were mutually exclusive and, therefore, indefinite. The Court explained that claims can vary in how they describe disclosed subject matter, and independent claims are not required to be entirely consistent with each other. The Court determined that because the district court erroneously found the categories of claims “mutually exclusive,” it forced itself into concluding that the claims were indefinite.
The Court further held that the term “substantially rigid portion/segment” is a functional limitation, which in this context only needs to be rigid enough to allow the device to be advanced within a guide catheter. While the Court held that this term should be construed consistently across the various asserted patents, it also determined that the precise boundary of the term need not be specified by the district court’s construction. As a result, the Court vacated and remanded to the district court, instructing the district court that the asserted claims were not necessarily mutually exclusive and that the term “substantially rigid portion/segment” does not have to have a consistent boundary across different independent claims.
