United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit

And you'll remember we talked about the fact that the judges of the Supreme Court will know they're not constitutional, they're unconstitutional.

And then the next question, what was going to happen? And so these cases made their way back down to the federal circuit and then down to the Court of International Trade.

Judge Eaton is the judge in the Court of International Trade, the CIT, who has been assigned essentially all of the litigation, including new litigation, that arises as a result of refund demands under IEPA.

And then, of course, also resolution of the cases that went up to the Supreme Court, the one that went up and came back, and then the other cases that were still essentially stayed until the Supreme Court made its ruling.

And Court of International Trade, I know that you feel like you can tell us to do something with all those importers, but all those importers are not in fact in front of you.

And so that then has led to an appeal by customs.

And so we do have now this, we do have interests where the case is basically gonna be in the federal circuit again, and that's gonna arise, these issues are gonna arise in the Court of Appeals.

Interestingly, and this was a head scratcher to me, right? Interestingly, Judge Eaton sent a letter to the Department of Justice the other day, yesterday.

They will get enforced if ever in some number of years, right? So litigation will play itself out over the next handful of years.

I think a tension that a lot of us in this space are focused on is, what percentage of these patents are actually patent eligible subject matter? So sort of the same question you're getting to, we think about that in the context of what we refer to as just one-on-one challenges, meaning are these patents directed to something that is an abstract idea and therefore should not be patent eligible? So we have really divergent things happening in our patent world right now, the Federal Circuit, who oversees all appeals of patent cases, is tightening the screws on what can be held to be patent eligible.

So there are a series of decisions that have come out over the last couple of years that have said generic machine learning concepts or algorithms applied for a different purpose or in a different system is not patent eligible, right? I'm oversimplifying it, but there are a number of cases that have said a version of that.

Meanwhile, the patent office at the front end of this creation of patent systems has gone the other way.

Okay.

But Washington had DC Circuit, Federal Circuit had the easiest.

And they changed that right after he got off of it by trying to kill Reagan.

So what I'm saying is, do you want to talk about the law? Do you want to talk about Kerry Prejean and these other people about what they think about medical? First of all, they don't know dick about psychiatry.

Yeah, it's a great setup.

Our mission today is doing a really close analysis of a highly consequential federal circuit court decision.

It's T-Mobile U.S. Inc. v. Chi Phi LLC, which came down on August 28, 2026.

And the underlying dispute here, just briefly, involves U.S. patent number 6,922,728, which is related to Wi-Fi calling technology.

Right.

But for our audience of patent professionals, the tech itself is, you know, it's actually going to take a backseat today.

The true focus of the reason this case is so important for us to talk about is the Federal Circuit's jurisdictional rationale.

It fundamentally tests the boundaries of where federal patent jurisdiction ends and state contract law begins.

The UK Supreme Court said no.

The US Federal Circuit said no.

But the questions keep coming.

And they're the kind of thing that could eventually produce a household name case because the facts are memorable.

So with the housekeeping out of the way, let's get into the material.

Today, we're unpacking a really fascinating federal circuit decision dated August 21st, 2026.

Right.

The case is U.S. inventor, Inkvee Squires.

not at all.

Like whether an invention survived the PTAB or deals with Section 112, Paragraph 6, that just isn't the issue here.

Our mission for this deep dive is to unpack the Federal Circuit's rationale for ultimately dismissing this lawsuit.

Which is super interesting because it all comes down to procedure.

So that was the genesis of the lawsuit.

It traveled its way up to the United States Court of Appeal for the Federal Circuit in 2018, and in that case, the circuit court said that one of the pay practices the agency had, which we can, we can discuss, was illegal.

And the rest of the case since then has been about trying to get these agents paid for overtime they worked that they were not paid for.

And what was the decision then recently in the Court of Federal Claims that moves this case, uh, to the next step?