Drafting a short and plain statement of a patent legal malpractice claim used to be a relatively straightforward matter under the now discredited Conley v. Gibson “no set of facts” standard. That pleading landscape dramatically changed in 2007.

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s Twombly and Iqbal decisions, federal court judges are now routinely called upon to apply their judicial experience and common sense in determining whether patent infringement complaint allegations cross a line separating merely “conceivable” claims from actually “plausible” ones.

Parties that cannot “nudge” their patent claims across this conceivable vs. plausible pleading line will find themselves on the losing side of a dismissal motion.