The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has reversed its prior decision affirming summary judgment in favor of an insurance company that refused to pay an arbitral award in a construction defect case. In Crownover v. Mid-Continent Casualty Co., No. 11-10166, a Texas couple, the Crownovers, initiated arbitration against the company that built their defective home, Arrow.

In a 7-2 decision, the United States Supreme Court has rejected the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit’s practice of reviewing all instances of district court patent claim construction using a de novo standard. In Teva Pharmaceuticals USA, Inc. v. Sandoz, Inc., No. 13-854 (January 20, 2015), a pharmaceutical company, Teva, held the patent for the manufacturing method used to create a drug called Copaxone.

Nancy H. Rogers, Professor Emeritus of Law at the Ohio State University Michael E. Moritz College of Law has authored a timely paper entitled, “When Conflicts Polarize Communities: Designing Localized Offices that Intervene Collaboratively,” Ohio State Journal on Dispute Resolution, Forthcoming; Ohio State Public Law Working Paper No. 283.

In Part Four we began to discuss solutions (not just problems), and urged that a first step in incentivizing counsel to hold down litigation costs is to have a neutral oversee the process of discovery closely enough (1) to make it in counsel’s interest to act reason­ably in the first place; and (2) to rule on unreasonable demands or failures to respond to discovery quickly, so that they gain no tactical advantage.