JACKSON, Miss. — A nine-year period where a plaintiff litigated asbestos bankruptcy issues in a separate court but took no substantive steps in her tort litigation in Mississippi warranted a trial court’s dismissal of the action in its entirety for lack of prosecution, the Mississippi Court of Appeals said Aug. 12 in affirming.

WILMINGTON, Del. — A majority of the Delaware Supreme Court on Aug. 12 affirmed a lower court’s summary judgment ruling in favor of liability insurers in a coverage dispute arising from an underlying earplug product liability multidistrict litigation that resulted in a $6 billion settlement and millions of dollars of defense costs, agreeing with the lower court that the insurers’ coverage obligations were not triggered because payments made by the insured’s corporate parent did not satisfy the self-insured retention because the corporate parent was not a “named insured.”

WASHINGTON, D.C. — A District of Columbia Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel dismissed an appeal by the federal government for lack of appellate jurisdiction and vacated a trial court’s ruling that probable cause exists to determine that the federal government’s actions in an immigrant removal class case constitute criminal contempt, opining that the government “satisfied the stringent requirements for a writ of mandamus.”

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals inappropriately deferred to the interpretation used by the U.S. Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB) of a section of the Lanham Act when affirming the TTAB’s rejection of an attorney’s application for a mark on US SPACE FORCE filed only days after President Donald J. Trump’s first proposals regarding the branch, the attorney told the U.S. Supreme Court in a petition for a writ of certiorari.

ST. PAUL, Minn. — A Minnesota appeals panel on Aug. 11 reversed a lower court’s summary judgment ruling in favor of a commercial property insurer in an insured’s coverage dispute arising from the COVID-19 pandemic, ruling that the governmental orders that shut down 150 of the insured’s health and fitness clubs in response to the pandemic are the causes of the insured’s losses for purposes of determining the number of occurrences subject to the policy’s “Interruption By Communicable Disease” coverage limit.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — A panel in the Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals held Aug. 11 that a federal judge in Utah was wrong to find that a patent was directed to an abstract idea, conflating a “rather simple mechanical invention” for stacking dumbbells with the kind of computerized automation that is often unpatentable as abstract.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) correctly invalidated all challenged claims in two related inter partes review (IPR) proceedings, a panel in the Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals held, affirming PTAB’s finding that the claims in the patents relate to bone plates for certain types of foot surgery.

SAN FRANCISCO — Any appeal by Anthropic PBC of a ruling rejecting fair use defenses for pirating copyrighted works or granting class certification should involve a full record, and to the extent going to trial financially threatens the artificial intelligence company, that reality would be the outcome of its own conduct, a federal judge in California said Aug. 11 in declining to stay the case pending appeal.