The privileges of working in the gig economy are too numerous to recount here. There's the freedom to set your own hours, the joy of being constantly rated on how cheerful (yet obsequious) you appear, and avoiding all of the complicated headaches that go with having health insurance and a retirement plan.
Hold it together Hoeschen, if you cry on the job again its back in the chokeyAI-Generated, displayed with permission
Well I have even more good news for you! Judge McCalla held just last week that at least some of you also enjoy the attorney-client privilege.
The defendant in Torvent LLC v. Techtronic Industries Co., Ltd. C.A. No. 21-853-JPM, D.I. 208 (D. Del. Jan. 11, 2024) was a startup with only a token staff of actual employees. In lieu of a permanent staff, they retained a large number of contractors for "various accounting and secretarial functions" and "consultants relat[ing] to licensing and damages issues." Id. at 6.
The dispute here arose because the defendant claimed privilege over a few thousand communications with these contractors. The plaintiff argued that these communications were not privileged because these were with third parties, rather than employees. The parties agreed that many of these contractors were functionally identical to employees. They disputed whether communications with these "functional equivalents" are entitled to the same privilege protections as actual employees.
Last year, the District of Delaware implemented a policy prohibiting most people who do not have a bar card from using personal electronics to the courthouse.
Notably, as of this month, Delaware phased out physical bar cards in favor of a printable version. I've had no trouble getting in with the printed bar card, so far, but I've heard secondhand that others may have had issues.
But what happens when out-of-town attorneys don't have a bar card at all, and need to use their personal electronics during the hearing? They must file a motion (or stipulation) and ask for an exemption from the rule.
So far, the Court has generally been willing to grant exceptions to …
"Counsel, go stand in the corner until you figure out what 'collegiality' means."Mag Pole, Unsplash
Several District of Delaware judges have discovery dispute procedures that require parties to first file a letter stating that the parties have met and conferred but are unable to resolve some disputes, and list the disputes.
This usually works out well, but a few issues can occasionally come up with this procedure. For example:
One party refuses to meet-and-confer, forcing the other side to file solo.
The parties have met and conferred to death, but one party refuses to sign the the joint letter anyway (or just refuses to respond), solely for the purpose of delay.
As defenses go, there's few better than "I don't infringe." Unfortunately, it's quite difficult to prove at the motion to dismiss stage. It is, after all, the rare complaint that contains the dark seed of its own demise on this front.
mmm . . . dark seedsAI-Generated, displayed with permission
You might think that a motion to dismiss based on non-infringement would be a little bit easier in the ANDA context. After all, you have this giant document listing everything in your product and what it does. You would be wrong.
Such was the lesson of Judge Fallon's opinion in Allergan, Inc. v. Mankind Pharma Ltd., C.A. No. 23-272 (D. Del. Dec. 21, 2023), unsealed last week. The patent there required (amongst dozens of assorted buffers, reagents, uppers, downers, and excipients) a phosphate buffer. The defendant responded by pointing out that none of the 3.2 trillion ingredients listed in their ANDA contained any phosphorus.
(Eds. Note—for the liberal arts majors amongst you, phosphorous is a pretty big part of anything "phosphate")
They thus moved for judgment on the pleadings of no literal infringement, reasoning that the ANDA controlled the infringement inquiry. Judge Fallon denied the motion however, holding that it was possible future evidence might contradict the ANDA:
Mankind Pharma insists that the ANDA specification controls the infringement inquiry. However, the case law cited by Mankind Pharma in support of this proposition explains that the infringement inquiry is based not only on the ANDA filing, but also on "other materials submitted by the accused infringer to the FDA, and other evidence provided by the parties." The Federal Circuit explained "[i]t is ... possible, at least in theory, that other evidence may directly contradict the clear representations of the ANDA and create a dispute of material fact[,]" even if "[s]uch circumstances [are] unlikely to arise in practice[.]" Consistent with this recitation of the applicable standard, each case cited by Mankind Pharma was decided on a fully developed record, either on summary judgment or following a bench trial.
Allergan, Inc. v. Mankind Pharma Ltd., C.A. No. 23-272, at 5-6 (D. Del. Dec. 21, 2023) (internal citations omitted).
This case follows several similar decisions in the district, Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corp. v. Alembic Pharms. Ltd, C.A. No. 22-1395-RGA, 2023 WL 6387975, at *5 (D. Del. Sept. 29, 2023) and InfoRLife SA v. Sun Pharm. Ind. Ltd, C.A. No. 21-1740-WCB, D.I. 153 at 4-5 (D. Del. Nov. 21, 2022), which the opinion discusses at some length. Neither of those cases however were quite as factually stark as the one presented here, where the claims clearly require phosphorus, and the ANDA includes . . . no phosphorus.
We mentioned back in October that Judge Hall was confirmed to the District of Delaware. Today, the Court started re-assigning cases from existing judges to Judge Hall. These arrive as a simple one-sentence docket entry:
Case Reassigned to Judge Jennifer L. Hall. Please include the initials of the Judge (JLH) after the case number on all documents filed.
The re-assignments involve cases at multiple stages, including past the close of fact discovery, and cases where Judge Hall was not previously involved as a magistrate judge.
One common question I see is "why did our case get re-assigned"? We can all speculate, but I'm not sure it's safe to read anything into a re-assignment like this beyond "our case was re-assigned …
We've talked a lot about "plain meaning" constructions, and how our judges havesometimespushedback against parties who offer plain meaning constructions without any indication of what the actual meaning of the term is.
Magistrate Judge Fallon issued an R&R today on an offshoot of this issue. In PPC Broadband, Inc. v. Charles Industries, LLC, C.A. No. 22-1517-GBW-SRF (D. Del. Jan. 8, 2024), the parties disputed the construction of only a single term, "drop cable." Plaintiff proposed not construing the term at all, and offered a generic definition as an alternative. The defendant proposed a specific construction that added limitations to the claim.
The patent at issue is directed towards a wall-mounted box that …
"Not invalid" may be a double negative, but it's definitely not the same as "valid."Markus Spiske, Unsplash
Chief Judge Connolly issued a short opinion this morning denying a motion for summary judgment that a patent was not patent ineligible, in C.R. Bard, Inc. v. Angiodynamics, Inc., C.A. No. 20-1544-CFC-SRF (D. Del. Jan. 3, 2024).
In short, the patentee had previously succeeded on the issue of § 101 ineligibility at the Federal Circuit, which reversed a lower-court finding of ineligibility and held that:
[T]he asserted claims in Bard’s three patents are directed to eligible subject matter under § 101.
C.R. Bard, Inc. v. Med. Components, Inc., C.A. Nos. 2022-1136, 2022-1186, 2023 U.S. App. LEXIS …
The District of Delaware's Default Standard for Discovery requires contentions in patent cases.
One common Delaware counsel question is: what level of detail is required for contentions?
The answer varies on what the concern is. There is a certain level of detail that will probably preclude the Court from ordering you to supplement your contentions—but providing just that bare level of detail may not be enough to preserve all arguments that you later want to make.
On Monday, Judge Burke denied a motion to strike invalidity contentions where a party had disclosed an obviousness theory as to a patent based on modification of a prior art reference, but had not disclosed their intent to cite and rely on their own product as evidence that the modification was obvious.
The plaintiff had moved to strike the discussion of the defendants' own product from their expert reports, on the theory that their contentions failed to to disclose their intent to use that product in their obviousness analysis. Judge Burke denied the motion, and explained that a party need not disclose all evidence in support of its contentions:
Although this is a difficult issue, the Court is not prepared to say that Defendants' actions amounted to an untimely disclosure. This is because Defendants have affirmatively represented that they are not relying on the direct aortic Engager system as prior art itself; instead, they rely on it only as a piece of evidence that will be used to "show that a direct aortic version would have been an obvious modification to Engager 3.0 at the relevant time." (D.I. 361 at 2) In other words, Defendants are relying on the system simply as evidence in support of a theory that was itself timely disclosed. And as Defendants note, courts generally hold that: (a) in validity-related or infringement-related contentions, a party is not required to cite to every piece of evidence that will be used to support a given theory; and (b) it is proper for an expert to expand upon such theories in his expert report. . . . The Court also notes that it is not as if Plaintiff had zero prior knowledge of the existence of the [Defendants'] system. As Defendants point out, they produced documents in discovery regarding this system, and their engineers testified at some length about the device during depositions. . . . (4) In light of the above, the Court cannot say that Defendants' conduct amounts to untimely disclosure that should be stricken.
Speyside Medical, LLC v. Medtronic CoreValve LLC, C.A. No. 20-361, D.I. 447 (D. Del. Dec. 18, 2023).
In my view, the Court is not saying that no evidence at all needs to be disclosed in support of the contentions—just that this particular evidence went beyond what was necessary, under the facts of the case.
It's impressive when an attorney files a short letter and gets the Court to do something that it is not often inclined to do.Immo Wegmann, Unsplash
The District of Delaware generally suspended its mediation program in 2021, and mediations before a magistrate judge rarely happen in patent cases these days (although they do sometimes happen in some other cases, such as employment cases).
Since then, parties have sometimes moved to private mediations—especially when ordered to—but generally in my experience the overall number of cases that go through mediation has declined, and there aren't a huge number of local patent-case mediators.
When we last discussed this, we noted from comments at the 2023 Bench and Bar conference that …
Judge Choe-Groves, of the Court of International Trade, has been newly added to the list of Delaware’s visiting judges. In early November, she was reassigned a first handful of cases.
[Thanks to an unnamed colleague who mentioned this fact in passing today and expressed surprise that we hadn’t highlighted it on the blog. Keep giving us feedback - we love it!]
Judge Choe-Groves has served as a visiting judge in several other jurisdictions including the Southern District of New York, District of Idaho, Northern District of Oklahoma, and United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Not all of Judge Choe-Groves’ visiting assignments have been patent cases. In fact, most of her earlier assignments appear to be …
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