patent infringement

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According to the Federal Circuit, twenty-two communications with a party over the course of three months may be enough to force a defendant to defend itself in the state where the party is located.  But three letters sent over that same time period is not enough.

In a recently published opinion, Trimble, Inc. v. PerDiemCo LLC, the Federal Circuit reversed a district court’s dismissal of a declaratory judgment noninfringement action for lack of personal jurisdiction.  PerDiemCo, a Texas LLC and the defendant in the action, had communicated with Trimble twenty-two times over the course of three months.  The communications began with a demand letter from PerDiemCo’s sole owner to Trimble’s subsidiary seeking to have Trimble pay for a non-exclusive license to practice PerDiemCo’s allegedly infringed patents.  The parties attempted to negotiate over the next three months via letters, emails, and telephone calls until Trimble filed a declaratory judgment noninfringement action in the Northern District of California, where Trimble is headquartered.

Recent Precedential Decisions Applying Fintiv

When a company is sued for patent infringement, often one early strategic consideration is whether to counterattack the patent’s validity at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) in a parallel post-grant proceeding such as inter partes review (IPR) or post-grant review (PGR). Although the PTAB has recently conformed certain practices more closely to litigation—notably, its claim construction and indefiniteness standards—it remains a valuable venue for patent challengers seeking a relatively speedy, predictable, and cost-effective process.

A California jury recently ordered Apple, Inc. (“Apple”) and Broadcom, Ltd. (“Broadcom”) to pay the California Institute of Technology (“Caltech”) over $1.1 billion in damages for infringing several patents owned by Caltech.  The patents relate to a type of error correction code used in wireless technology (known as “irregular repeat…

Last week, a federal judge in California denied the plaintiff’s motions to disqualify the defendant’s counsel, finding that the firm’s former representation of the plaintiff was not sufficiently recent, substantial, or substantively related to the firm’s current representation of the defendant to warrant disqualification.

The plaintiff, IPS Group, Inc., brought two related lawsuits against Duncan Solutions, Inc., for patent infringement — one in July 2015 and another in March 2017. In June 2017, the law firm Mintz Levin Cohn Ferris Glovsky and Popeo P.C. (“Mintz”) joined the defense teams representing Duncan in both matters. IPS Group made two “virtually identical” motions in July to disqualify Mintz in each case, arguing that (1) IPS Group was a current client of Mintz, so concurrent representation of IPS Group and Duncan was a breach of the duty of loyalty, and alternatively, (2) IPS Group was a former client of Mintz, who had obtained confidential information from IPS Group material to Mintz’s current representation of Duncan.