Subpoena Modified
Always good to see an order indicating when a subpoena crosses the line. Even if we did have to … wait for it.
Judge Ron Clark
The Heartbreak of Settlement Credits
It may lack the drama of the Packard sawmill burning down on Twin Peaks, but if an order applying settlement credits and awarding court costs doesn’t get your heart racing, why do you even have a bar card anyway?
Summary Judgment Granted in Part in Discrimination Case
This is a sex discrimination case in which the magistrate judge recommended that summary judgment be granted in part – a recommendation that the district judge accepted.
Impermissible Redactions
This opinion by Judge Clark provides some insight into how courts view redaction requests. The parties in this case sought to redact their production costs, per-unit profits and sales figures from a transcript of the case management conference.
It didn’t go well.
Motions for New Trial
Motions for new trial don’t have quite the same significance in federal court as they do in Texas state court, but they are, nonetheless an important tool to at least evaluate after hell has gone to a handbasket at trial. In this Sherman Division case, Judge Clark denied a motion for new trial by the losing party which raised several issues.
Post-trial accounting (escrow, royalty rate & interest calculations)
Assume a jury finds infringement – which on recent numbers happens about half the time a patent case goes to trial. Then assume that the patent is still in effect and the jury was not asked to determine future damages. In recent cases following the general abolition of injunctive relief in most patent cases, the Federal Circuit has instructed trial courts how this is supposed to work. In a recent decision arising out of a verdict in favor of the patentee in a medical device case an EDTX judge applied this caselaw and set forth how it worked out, including the creation of an escrow account, the appropriate royalty rate for future sales, as well as issues of prejudgment and postjudgment interest.
284/285 Time: Orders on Motions for Enhanced Damages and Attorneys Fees
In an average year about fifteen patent cases are tried in the Eastern District of Texas. Statistically, about half are complete defense verdicts, and of the remaining ones, only a few have willfulness findings, so it’s a rare case that presents both a Section 284 claim for enhanced damages and a Section 285 claim for exceptional cases status. When we do have them it allows analysis of which conduct supports (or doesn’t) an award, since courts try to ensure that a party isn’t inadvertently penalized twice for the same conduct. But a recent case out of Beaumont presents both, and provides some useful insight into a trial court’s calculation of enhanced damages, as well as the more frequently presented question of whether a case is “exceptional” for Section 285 purposes.
Remittitur and Additur: Damages in Patent Case Cut Back on JMOL
The next situation relevant to the remittitur/additur distinction in patent cases arises when the trial judge reduces the amount of damages determined by the jury. That happened in this recent EDTX patent case when
Expert testimony excluded in product liability case
When I started practicing law just a few weeks shy of 25 years ago, the most common cases I worked on were product liability cases, in which plaintiffs asserted that defective products, most commonly motor vehicles, caused injuries or death. While these cases are rarer than they once were, they still show up from time to time, and a perennial issue in them is the admissibility of testimony of the parties’ expert witnesses on the various issues in the case, including the existence of a defect, whether the defect caused the plaintiff’s injuries, and the extent of the plaintiff’s injuries. In this case, Judge Clark recently resolved two motions dealing with expert testimony in a vehicle product liability case. In the first,
Beaumont jury awards $20.34 million in medical device case
Last week a Beaumont jury in Chief Judge Ron Clark’s court returned a verdict in favor off the plaintiff in Barry v. Medtronic, which dealt with devices used in scoliosis surgeries. It found all the asserted claims infringed and willfully so, and that none of the defensive issues had been shown by clear and convincing evidence. It awarded a total of $20,346,390.