Form 18: much ado about nothing?

Before we look too deeply into our crystal ball we should take a step back to see why anybody even cared about Form 18. Since 1938, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (specifically rule 84 and the appendix of forms) have included sample forms that were supposed to be “sufficient” to satisfy all of the requirements in the federal rules. For those of us who practise patent litigation, that meant developing a close relationship with Form 18, the federal rules’ very simple patent infringement complaint. Indeed, the form complaint was so simple that the plaintiff did not even need to identify which claims were infringed or the name of the accused products.