Michel, in a letter to Shanna Winters, Chief Counsel to the Subcommittee on The Courts, Internet and Intellectual Property:

[T]he present bills [comprising the Patent Reform Act of 2007] require a new kind of macroeconomic analysis that would be extremely costly and time consuming, far more so than current application of the well-settled apportionment law. Resulting additional court delays would be severe, as would additional attorneys' fees and costs.

In short, the current provision has the following shortcomings. First, it requires a massive damages trial in every case and does so without an assignment of burden of proof on the proper party and articulation of a clear standard of proof associated with that burden. Second, the analysis required is vastly more complicated than that done under current law. Third, the meaning of various phrases in the bills would be litigated for many years creating an intervening period of great uncertainty that would discourage settlements of disputes without litigation or at least prior to lengthy and expensive trials.

Michel provided a copy of a study by William Rooklidge, former AIPLA president, while getting in a poke at self-interested corporate lawyers and self-important ivory tower types -

[The Rooklidge study] was written by a seasoned patent litigator with direct experience in how such damage theories are actually litigated in court. Lawyers employed by particular companies, like most law professors, have little or no experience from that perspective. Mr. Rooklidge, by contrast, has several decades of litigation experience in precisely these types of cases.

The Rooklidge report itself begins with a nutshell bombshell:

The provisions of the current Senate and House patent reform bills, S.11452 and H.R. 1908,3 purporting to reform patent damages law are more akin to “repeal” than “reform.” Upon close inspection the proposed legislation would not codify existing law, and in fact would make substantial changes destructive to the patent system.

Earlier coverage in the Patent Prospector on proposed revision to § 284.