Behind the Scenes of the “Such As” Case
AdamsDrafting:
Thanks to the litigation in Lawler Mfg. v. Bradley Corp., recently I discovered the nuances of such as. That led me to write about such as in this post.
Yesterday I received a message from Wayne Turner, a litigation partner in the downtown Indianapolis office of Bingham McHale. I enjoyed Wayne’s message, and I thought you might too, if you found my such as post of interest. Here’s Wayne’s message:
As the lawyer who argued the Lawler v. Bradley case (but fortunately did not draft the agreement), I appreciated your reference to the inferential meaning of the absent comma—not the biggest point, but one the lower court treated as wholly insignificant. The main drivers in the case were probably that (a) the specifically mentioned products had been sold by Bradley before the patent infringement began (so this phrase was designed to “protect” them in particular), while the other products to which Bradley later tried…