It’s still almost as common as not for parties to ask the Court to redact confidential business information after the fact rather than at the time of the hearing or trial, despite a standing order in some EDTX courts requiring the latter. This is the latest order addressing that issue.
Motions to transfer venue asserting inconvenience are less common recently, but this case provides a solid workout for the traditional factors, and indicates which continue to have significance when Section 1404 is asserted, particularly in a competitor case.
I don’t mean to sound like I don’t like these orders because I do – they’re always informative and provide a useful explanation of what precisely about a damages expert’s opinion is and is not admissible. So let’s see what this opinion can tell us about the not particularly common application of the Panduit factors relevant to claims of lost profits.
The issue on this motion was whether the plaintiff could go forward with claims of willful infringement. The holding granted the motion, but only on one side of the filing date.
The challenge to this damages expert’s opinions was that they were not reliable, focusing on the propriety of the licenses relied upon. After reviewing the relevant standards, the Court denied the motion, but required supplemental briefing on an issue raised by the motion.
This is a Twiqbal motion in a patent infringement case that seeks dismissal for failure to state a claim, asserting that the facts alleged in the complaint are insufficient to state a claim that is “plausible.” The Court’s analysis provides a useful example of what needs to be in a complaint to meet this standard.
This is another case where an EDTX court has allowed the addition of an individual who was alleged to have controlled litigation decisions for a patent plaintiff to a case for purposes of satisfying a Section 285 fee award.
A somewhat common summary judgment motion late in patent cases is one that seeks summary judgment as to the plaintiff’s claims of willful infringement. This case provides a useful example of a ruling on such a motion which is, at least in part, aptly summarized by Collin’s shirt – “I Can Only Please One Person Each Day – Today’s Not Your Day (Tomorrow doesn’t look good either)”. Behind Collin is one of the Rose windows at Notre Dame de Paris, which we learned earlier today … are still standing.
Last month my wife emailed me from the Udvar-Hazy museum outside DC to tell me that our youngest, Parker, had turned into me – he thinks he’s an expert on every aircraft they saw and narrated his way through not one but two Smithsonian museums dedicated to air & space (note the B-17 shirt). His brother Collin’s answer to my question of what he saw at the museum that he liked the most was priceless. “The exit,” he deadpanned.
This order deals with objections to real experts based on a common complaint – that the disclosures were procedurally improper. As we all have to pass that procedural threshold to get expert testimony in at trial, it’s worth seeing what the court thought about the disclosures.
This order excluding a technical expert witness in a patent case is an interesting one because it asserts several grounds, only some of which will give lawyers nightmares.
