A Blog About Intellectual Property Litigation and the District of Delaware


Entries for tag: Mandamus

OK Nate, you win. Mavexar is a crab now.
OK Nate, you win. Mavexar is a crab now. AI-Generated, displayed with permission

We posted last month about two more mandamus petitions regarding Chief Judge Connolly's recent efforts to enforce his standing orders regarding disclosure requirements in his cases.

The Mavexar saga is getting a bit complicated, so here is a quick recap of the mandamus petitions:

  • Chief Judge Connolly scheduled hearings in several cases regarding various plaintiffs' compliance with his standing orders
  • In two of the hearings, the plaintiffs explained that an entity called Mavexar recruited the plaintiffs and took up to 95% of their proceeds
  • The Court ordered some of the Mavexar entities to produce a broad range of communications among the plaintiffs, Mavexar, and their attorneys
  • One …

A Creek View
AI-Generated, displayed with permission

We've posted a lot about the Mavexar hearings. Earlier this month, two of the plaintiffs in cases that had hearings scheduled, Creekview IP LLC and Waverly Licensing LLC, filed nearly-identical petitions for mandamus.

The petitions are linked below. In each, the petitioner seeks to reverse Chief Judge Connolly's order scheduling an evidentiary hearing to investigate compliance with the Court's standing orders:

Petitioner respectfully requests that the Court issue a writ of mandamus reversing the Memorandum Order and ending the judicial inquisition of Petitioner.

The petitions argue that the Court lacked Article III standing, because the cases had been dismissed, that Chief Judge Connolly abuse his discretion in issuing the standing order, and that Congress has …

Hasnain Sikora, Unsplash

The Federal Circuit made its second foray into the Mavexar (I think) saga on Friday when it ruled on a new petition for Mandamus is In re: Swirlate IP LLC.

The plaintiff in Swirlate filed a petition for mandamus on November 30, seeking to stop a scheduled December 6 hearing.

I should note at the outset the while the Swirlate case seems to mimic the M.O. of a Mavexar entity—a Texas LLC with a single managing partner with no apparent connection to the patent—the Court has not yet held a hearing on the issue, so we can't say conclusively that the matter is related. It was, however, scheduled for a hearing in December that that sole …

Yesterday the Federal Circuit granted a mandamus petition to transfer a case against Apple out of the Western District of Texas to the Northern District of California, ordering that Judge Alan D. Albright had clearly erred in declining to transfer the case.

Patently O has a full summary of the opinion, including the strong dissent.

A couple of additional thoughts:

  • It is interesting that the Federal Circuit did not have a problem with Apple filing its mandamus petition before the District Court had even ruled on the motion to transfer. Footnote 1 does limit this practice to the "particular circumstances of the case," but obviously it worked out well for Apple here.
  • The Federal Circuit's opinion applies Fifth Circuit …