Yes, this is yet another Pennypack post. I can't resist. It's a tough-to-apply standard that impacts many cases (patent and otherwise). And it can sometimes seem to reward bad behavior by litigants, even—maybe especially—when applied as written.
But not this time! In Prolitec Inc. v. ScentAir Technology, LLC, C.A. No. 20-984-WCB (D. Del. Oct. 2, 2024), the patentee produced documents about a pre-priority-date sale of prior art after fact discovery closed and just five days before opening reports.
Unsurprisingly, the other side's opening expert report five days later did not include invalidity allegations about this sale.
Parties stipulate to drop various claims and defenses all of the time. Sometimes, the parties simply bargain with each other to winnow down the scope of the case for trial. Other times, a defense or claim may be dropped to avoid some especially harsh discovery burden. Sometimes you just hate a patent claim sooo much.
Always there are dangers. For one rule is supreme in the realm of stipulations.
No takebacks.
AI-Generated, displayed with permission
Such was the lesson this week in Allergan, Inc. v. Mankind Pharma Ltd., C.A. No. 23-272-JFM, D.I. 126 (D. Del. July 24, 2024). The defendant, Mankind, had stipulated to drop all invalidity defenses as to one patent "because it would streamline the case and would allow them to avoid answering discovery requests" and because "the 504 patent had been unsuccessfully challenged in the past and the invalidity theories that remained were weak." Id. at 4.
A bit later Judge Andrews issued is opinion in Allergan USA, Inc. v. MSN Labs. Private Ltd., C.A. No. 19-1727-RGA (D. Del. Sept. 27, 2023), which we covered previously on the blog. TL;DR Judge Andrews held (for the first time in the district) that OTDP applied when the first-filed, and first-issued, patent was the one being invalidated.
All of a sudden, the defendant realized that they might have a real humdinger of a defense and so they moved to "vacate" the earlier stipulation in anticipation of the Federal Circuit affirming the decision in MSN.
Visiting Judge Murphy, however, held that this ...
A motion for attorneys' fees is a tough row to hoe. The shoddiest AI lawyer could pull together 8 paragraphs of quotes from the Supreme Court, the Federal Circuit, Blackstone, and Hammurabi's code, warning that fees are an extreme sanction to be used only sparingly, lest their mysterious power be depleted.
And he works for peanuts!AI-Generated, displayed with permission
As Judge Williams' opinion in BearBox LLC v. Lancium LLC, C.A. No. 21-534-GBW (D. Del. Jan 9, 2024) shows, you can even lose a motion for fees if the Court previously held the other party acted in bad faith.
The opinion in Bearbox, contains a healthy recitation of losses by the plaintiff at various stages of the case, culminating in an unsuccessful trial on the merits. Its' not worth rehashing the whole thing for our purposes—
(Eds. note - what is our purpose? sound off in the comments, but know in advance that I will not read anything by a philosopher or anyone else with a fuller beard than I possess)
—but the big takeaway is that the defendant's failure to win the case at summary judgment effectively scuttled any argument that the plaintiffs' claims were objectively baseless and unreasonable:
Moreover, while the Court adopted Defendants' proposed claim constructions, the Court denied Defendants' motion for summary judgement because the Court found that there existed genuine issues of material fact regarding who conceived of the '433 patent's subject matter. Thus, Plaintiffs' decision to continue litigating the sole inventorship claim after receiving the Court's claim constructions was not sufficiently unreasonable to warrant a finding that this case is exceptional . . .
The Court, in denying Defendants' motion for summary judgement, rejected Defendants' argument that no reasonable juror could find that Mr. Storms was the sole inventor of the '433 patent. Thus, even considering the '632 patent application, Plaintiffs' position that Mr. Storms was the sole inventor of the '433 patent was not meritless.
Id. at 4, 6-7 (internal citations omitted).
The one issue where they seemed to get some traction was in a successful motion to strike filed earlier in the case. The plaintiff had apparently served a new expert report, without leave, in order to conform their expert's opinion to a the Court's claim construction. Defendants successfully moved to strike the report. In its decision, the Court applied the Pennypack factors and actually found that the plaintiffs' actions indicated bad faith.
Nevertheless, in ruling on the § 285 motion, Judge Williams found that this act of bad faith was not enough to make the case exceptional:
Accordingly, even though the Court found Plaintiffs' timing indicative of bad faith, the Court finds that, in this instance, Plaintiffs' desire to supplement Dr. McClellan's expert report to ensure consistency with the Court's claim construction order did not render this an exceptional case.
Id. at 5.
So take heart, those have shown bad faith. You may yet find yourselves sufficiently redeemed to avoid fees.
Motions to strike are tough in Delaware. Although the reign of Pennypack seems to be slowly entering its dotage, the door remains open for the late-disclosed.
With exclusion so rare, its a bit odd we don't see more of Rule 37's lesser sanction -- fees.
But visiting Judge McCalla gave us one on Monday in Invacare Corp. v. Sunrise Medical (US) LLC, C.A. No. 21-823-JPM (D. Del. May 22, 2023) (Oral Order). The facts there were pretty stark.
The defendant had an inequitable conduct claim based on the patentee's failure to inform the PTO that identical claims had previously been rejected. Plaintiff's prosecution counsel testified that the failure was due to an error in an internal spreadsheet they kept of related applications that omitted the relevant application. Plaintiff had previously withheld the spreadsheet as privileged but eventually waived privilege and produced it.
Unfortunately, it came out during expert discovery that the spreadsheet actually contained the relevant application. This was probably a bad day for a lawyer somewhere. Plaintiff then went back to see if there were other versions of the spreadsheet that did omit the application -- they eventually found and produced some, but by then it was 4 months after the close of fact discovery.
Defendant moved to exclude these new references. Judge McCalla denied the motion but ordered plaintiff to pay what will surely be a hefty sum to cover the ...
Today we highlight a decade-old opinion involving an inventor’s death, the reports of which were greatly exaggerated. The moral of the story: trust but verify. Do a Google search, even if you have it on good authority. Question your assumptions.
It's an oddball case that provides the perfect foil for Nate’s article yesterday involving the opposite fact-pattern—a dead expert. Here, an inventor thought expired was “not only alive, but also willing (‘indeed eager’)” to testify in the upcoming trial, scheduled only ten days away.
In an unusual mix-up, plaintiff relied on testimony from the plaintiff’s 30(b)(6) witness, a former high-ranking officer for plaintiff's company, who said that the inventor was deceased. Where'd he get that information? Several of plaintiff’s …
In the before time, when the green grass grew tall even in the wan Wilmington sun, all scheduling orders had two rounds of contentions, one early in the case and another near the close of fact discovery. A bit over two years ago, Judge Connolly shook things up by introducing a new form order in his cases that included only a single round of contentions early in the case and requiring "good cause" to amend.
AI-Generated, displayed with permission
And so, on this slow news day, I decided to take a look back at how often parties manage to show the requisite good cause to amend their contentions in cases assigned to Judge Connolly (many of these are decided in the first instance by a magistrate judge).
The upshot is, that most of these motions seem to succeed. DocketNavigator shows 10 such motions in cases assigned to Judge Connolly (which strikes me as low, but I'm not a soulless trawling algorithm, so what do I know?). Of those 7 have been granted, and only 3 have been denied. Normally I would put in the percentages here, but I trust you all to do the math on this one.
This brings to mind another question, which I shall raise in a further blog post on another slow day, does Judge Connolly receive fewer motions like these than our judges who don't specifically require good cause? I.e., are parties who would otherwise just file late contentions and take their shot under Pennypack factors deciding not to do so because they know they can't show good cause?!
All this and more on next weeks episode of IPDE! (Batman theme plays)
It happens all of the time: You've got arguments A, B, and C that you want to fit in your brief, but you don't have the space to address them all.
What to do? Cut the weaker arguments?
For most attorneys, the answer is: of course not! They move the lesser argument to a footnote in a hail-mary attempt to win if the better arguments fail.
Does it work? Not usually. Here in D. Del., judges have suggested that parties waive arguments when they present them only in cursory footnotes, and Judge Noreika recently noted that "courts traditionally do not consider arguments presented entirely in footnotes." Nw. Univ. v. Universal Robots A/S, C.A. No. …
What do you do when your expert's damages opinion gets excluded, the Court rules you cannot proceed based solely on the factual evidence, and you bear the burden of proof?
According to an opinion from Judge Andrews yesterday, one option is to call the other side’s expert—even if the other side otherwise refuses to put her on the stand.
This Case Again?
We've actually talked about this case, Shure Inc. v. ClearOne, Inc., C.A. No. 19-1343-RGA-CJB (D. Del.), quite a bit at this point, including defendant's efforts to use DJ jurisdiction to keep part of the case out of Delaware, and plaintiff's effort …
We've written several posts about the Pennypack factors and how hard it can be to win a motion to strike in D. Del. The upshot is that it's often better to simply reach agreement on a curative remedy rather than spend time on full-blown motion practice.
Case in point: on Monday, Judge Burke denied a motion to strike a two-page supplemental expert declaration on a patentability issue. Applying the Pennypack factors, he concluded
that having to respond to the supplemental declaration (which, after all, relates to one discrete issue, and is only two pages long) would occasion some great prejudice to Defendants. The issue can be resolved by permitting Defendants to file a supplemental sur-rebuttal expert report on …
Case in point: on Friday, Judge Andrews granted a motion to strikeDOE theories asserted for the first time in an opening expert report. The plaintiff offered a number of excuses for disclosing the theories when it did—"it was only able to collect evidence to support its new DOE theories" after a COVID-delayed source code review, it lacked supporting evidence until a technical deposition in November 2020, and so on.
Judge Andrews not only rejected these excuses, but took it a step further—coming very close to finding that the plaintiff acted in …
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