Led by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Bilski decision, federal appeals courts in 2010 provided needed clarity to gray areas of intellectual property law, including the validity of business method patents, the standards for infringement in gray markets and on the Internet, the requirements for pleading false patent marking and the standards for calculating royalty damages. Finnegan represented parties in two of the cases highlighted in the article. The first was the Bernard Bilski and Rand Warsaw’s case where the court unanimously held that Bilski and Warsaw’s application for a method covering hedging risks in commodities trading was too abstract to be patent eligible; however, Justice Anthony Kennedy and four other justices agreed that business methods were not exempt from patent protection. The decision additionally rejected the machine-or-transformation test devised by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit as the sole test of patentable subject matter under Section 101 of the Patent Act, but failed to take a stand on defining an appropriate test for patent eligibility of a process. Finnegan also represented Eli Lilly in a March en banc ruling where nine of the 11 Federal Circuit judges reaffirmed that there was a separate written description requirement for patent applicants under the U.S. Patent Act and that Lilly did not infringe Ariad’s patent by making osteoporosis drug Evista and septic shock treatment Xigris because the patent was invalid for failing to meet the requirement. The article states that this case could potentially have an impact on the drafting of patents, particularly in the chemical and biological fields where the claims are often directed to broad, generic classes of compounds.