It’s fitting that Donald Dunner has argued more cases before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (165 and counting) than any other lawyer. After all, he helped create it.
As a patent law consultant to a government commission in the mid- 1970s, Dunner noticed that the lack of a single court for patent appeals had led to varied and widely inconsistent interpretations of patent laws. He got his chance to fix that problem in the late 1970s, when he served on a Carter administration commission that recommended the formation of what would become the Federal Circuit. As president of the American Patent Law Association, he went on to testify before Congress in favor of the court’s formation. And after the court was established in 1982, Dunner was appointed chair of the advisory committee that helped formulate its rules. “There are few who can equal Don’s contributions to the patent bar and the adjudication of patent matters, and that’s before you take into consideration all the cases he has argued,” says George Washington University Law School professor Martin Adelman.
