Last week, the District of Delaware began assigning patent cases to visiting judge J. Nicholas Ranjan of W.D. Pa. As far as I can tell, these are the first D. Del. cases to be assigned to Judge Ranjan.
Following the assignments, Judge Ranjan issued the following order in each case:
ORDER, regarding practices and procedures of Judge Ranjan. I was recently reassigned several patent cases in the District of Delaware. In order to provide some degree of procedural consistency, I intend to follow all local rules and standing orders of the District of Delaware, and I intend to utilize Judge Andrews forms and orders, until further notice. So counsel should comply with all …
Writing this blog, I sometimes feel like an especially jaded film critic. Having seen so much, I can no longer get a thrill from from a well-constructed plot and competent acting. I can only be excited by Croatian claymation about murderous cetaceans, or a silent black and white documentary about a cat who eats figs.
All this is that I love a novel theory, and by Jove I've got one for you today.
In Samsung Elecs. Co., Ltd. v. Technical Consumer Prods., Inc., C.A. No. 23-186-JNR (D. Del. May 2, 2024), Samsung sued both the overseas manufacturer and seller of allegedly infringing products in one action. The seller moved to sever and stay the claims against it under the "customer suit" exception, arguing that the manufacturer was the "true defendant," while its role was "merely peripheral."
This was a bit odd, because the customer suit exception normally applies to cases where the actions are proceeding in different venues:
[C]ustomer-suit exception cases “typically arise” in the context of forum-shopping, “when related patent infringement actions are pending in different jurisdictions[.]” Basically, courts have concluded that the normal first-filed priority will give way when a suit against the re-seller was the first one filed. . . .Though courts have applied the exception when the manufacturer and re-seller are defendants in the same suit, they still do so with principles of forum selection in mind. For example, the customer-suit exception would apply if it would mean staying the case as to the re-seller to then transfer the case to a different and more appropriate venue for the lawsuit against the manufacturer.
Id. at 2-3 (internal citations omitted).
Judge Ranjan denied the motion, finding that the customer-suit exception did not provide a "general exception to a lawsuit against a manufacturer and re-seller":
The circumstances of this case don’t concern dueling lawsuits or forum selection issues, as there are no separate competing lawsuits, and no Defendant has contested venue or jurisdiction or would seek transfer to a different venue. Moreover, HGC and TCP are represented by the same counsel, so the inefficiencies created by forcing a “true defendant” and an unrelated “peripheral defendant,” such as one among many customers of the “true defendant,” to litigate together are absent here. In short, HGC hasn’t proffered a reason for the Court to grant its motion that furthers the spirit of the customer-suit exception.
Id. at 3.
Well it was a nice try anyway. The whole opinion is worth a read and goes into greater depth on the efficiencies that might be gained or lost by severance in similar situations.
This report, produced by the Court, is available on the Court's website. I’d encourage our readers to peruse the full report, but we highlight a few interesting statistics and announcements below.
IP Cases Continue to Dominate the Docket
In 2022, there was an increase in jury trials to 19 in the District of Delaware. Patent/IP cases accounted for 44% of all civil filings in the last 7 years and 43% in 2022 alone.
Nationally, patent filings decreased from 4,037 filings to 3,854. In the District of Delaware in 2022, 685 patent cases were filed, a 23.04 percent decrease from the previous year of 890. Delaware is second in the nation, after …
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