December 1, 2020 marked the five-year anniversary of the Supreme Court’s abrogation of Form 18—the model complaint that provided the minimum requirements for stating a claim of direct infringement.  Following the abrogation of Form 18, patent infringement claims must satisfy the plausibility standard articulated in Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly, 550 U.S. 544 (2007) and Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 556 U.S. 662 (2009).  Courts, however, have diverged in applying Iqbal and Twombly to patent cases.  As a result, pleading standards now vary from jurisdiction-to-jurisdiction (and even from judge-to-judge within the same jurisdiction).

In a series of blog posts, we are exploring how courts are applying the Iqbal/Twombly pleading standards to patent cases five years after Form 18 was abrogated.  In Part 1, we examined Federal Circuit opinions, including the seeming inconsistencies among those opinions.  In this installment, we look at how pleading standards have been applied in the District of Delaware.
Continue Reading Patent Infringement Pleading Standards Remain Unsettled Five Years After the Abrogation of Form 18 – Part 2: Pleading Standards in Delaware