PALO ALTO — Federal Circuit Chief Judge Randall Rader came to San Francisco last month, pitching patent lawyers to reduce the cost of patent litigation by scaling back their discovery demands.

On Friday, his Federal Circuit colleague Timothy Dyk came to Palo Alto with a different suggestion for reforming the patent system: more imaginative lawyering. The patent bar, Dyk said at a Stanford conference on patent reform, is “too timid and too lacking in creativity.”