A Blog About Intellectual Property Litigation and the District of Delaware


Entries for tag: FRCP 30(b)(1)

France—the place where these inventors will probably not be deposed.
France—the place where these inventors will probably not be deposed. Gloria Villa, Unsplash

Last week in Pierre Fabre Medicament SAS v. Rubicon Research Private Ltd., C.A. No. 24-811-JLH-SRF (D. Del.), Judge Fallon ruled on a set of discovery disputes involving a motion to compel the patentee to make its inventors—who are employees residing in France—available for fact depositions under FRCP 30(b)(1).

In this case, it looks like the accused infringer has a an improper inventorship defense—which sounds like a very good reason to want to depose the inventors.

The interesting thing, to me, is that the patentee tried to fight these depositions at all. The Court easily (and unsurprisingly) batted away each of their objections.

The …

"Whatcha doin'?" "I'm writing out my 543rd trade secret. One hundred more to go." AI-Generated, displayed with permission

In my experience it's fairly uncommon to see a party get multiple days of deposition time with a fact witness deponent, outside of a few recurring circumstances (e.g. translated depositions). That's why I thought it was worth pointing out the ruling unsealed today in Gemedy, Inc. v. The Carlyle Group, Inc., C.A. No. 23-157-CFC-SRF (D. Del. June 7, 2024).

In Gemedy, plaintiff alleged misappropriation of 643 trade secrets, all authored (or co-authored, for 11 of them) by one person over an eight-year period. The defendant sought to depose that one person for four days, given their scope of …