Most practicing Delaware attorneys can probably rattle off page limit requirements in their sleep, given how frequently we hear this question from out-of-town counsel.
Limits vary case-to-case based on differences scheduling orders and other circumstances, but below we've summarized some of the default limits set by the District of Delaware local rules, standing orders, and our judges' form scheduling orders.
[The irony of subjecting readers to a long post on word limits is not lost on me.]
You are all of course familiar with the classic tale of chicken little. You may be less familiar with the plot of if the ill-fated Disney move of the same name. They both start the same, chicken sleeping under a tree has something fall on him, tells everyone the sky is falling and starts a panic.
Here the stories diverge. In the folktale, chicken little and his panicked friends meet a while fox, who tricks them into taking shelter in his cave, and then eats them. You can see the lesson.
In the film, chicken little is scorned, but later redeems himself by helping the local baseball team win the pennant (?). Afterwards, he is again hit by a piece of the sky, which turns out to be high tech camouflage used to hide alien spaceships in low orbit. The ships descend upon the hapless town, and the whole thing turns out to be a big misunderstanding. The lesson is somewhat less clear. This film made 300 million dollars.
Those of you who read Law360 (who somehow scooped me on this, but whose article does not recount the plot of a 20-year-old children's movie in unnecessary detail) will have guessed that this is all leading up to Judge Andrews' Oral Order yesterday in Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation v. Dr. Reddy's Laboratories, Inc., C.A. No. 19-2053-RGA. D.I. 512 (D. Del. Apr. 2, 2025):
Yesterday, MSN said the sky was falling and it needed emergency relief. I granted it. Today, MSN has filed an emergency motion requesting additional relief for essentially the same falling sky. I decline to enter any additional relief at this time or to consider the motion on an emergency basis.
For those wondering about the context here, the Federal Circuit just recently issued its mandate in the case ruling that the asserted patent was valid and infringed. Judge Andrews then promptly entered a final judgment, which included an order setting the effective date for approval of MSN's ANDA until after the end of Novartis' pediatric exclusivity period.
It's unclear from the docket exactly what happened next, but it appears that MSN emailed chambers ...
We've writtenbefore about how delay can kill your discovery motions. We got another straightforward example on Monday in Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation v. HEC Pharm Co., Ltd., C.A. No. 20-133, D.I. 340 (D. Del. Mar 31, 2025).
There, the defendants sought depositions of two foreign inventors through the Hague convention. The defendants have known the relevance of the inventors' knowledge since at least July, 2022, but only moved for issuance of letters rogatory in December 2024.
The case was stayed for a portion of that time, but in total, the Court found that there was no good reason that it should have taken so long to seek this discovery:
I will speak a truth that many of you have suspected. Sometimes we (well, I) pick a case just because it has a fun name. My original post today was about HQ Specialty Pharma Corp. v. Fresenius Kabi USA, LLC, C.A. No. 21-1714-MN. Honestly the case was too fact intensive to easily convert to a general interest blog post. On the other hand, it contained a great deal of discussion of the testimony of a New Jersey Pharmaceutical executive named Mr. Pizza.
"I'm cooked!"AI-Generated, displayed with permission
The whole thing ended up being just jokes and out of context slices ("Mr. Kelly . . . doubted whether Mr. Pizza 'had any knowledge of the [prior art] references'") …
My name is Lindsey Gellar, and I am an associate at Shaw Keller, posting for the first time here. Yes, Andrew has finally managed to rope another lackey (associate) into writing for the blog. Today, I'm going to look at what it takes to plead equitable defenses in the District of Delaware.
When it comes to pleading most affirmative defenses, the bar is on the floor. An affirmative defense does not need to be plausible to survive; it must merely provide fair notice of the issue involved. Internet Media Corp. v. Hearst Newspapers, LLC, C.A. No. 10-690-SLR, 2012 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 126788, at *7 (D. Del. …
I'm not sure why the AI image generator made the judge so much bigger than the traffic they are directing, but it seems somehow appropriate.AI-Generated, displayed with permission
I've noticed, and heard from others, that it seems like there were a lot of new case filings in the District of Delaware this month.
I was curious if that's true, so I did some unscientific research based on how many PACER new-case e-mails I've received. So far, for March 2025, I've seen 127 of these. That's more than any of the 16 prior months, only one of which broke 100. And it's quite a bit more than the 49 I received in January, or the 74 I received in February.
March of last year (2024) was busy as well, with 97 such e-mails. But, even if we get no more filings today or Monday, this year's number will top last year's by more than 30%.
Of course, not all cases are the same. A litigation campaign by an NPE against many defendants is very different from a true competitor patent litigation. From a quick review, the filings this month look like a mix of both. And these include a mix of various other civil filings, not just patent cases. So it's hard to say just how big of an increase in actual workload it may be.
The blog has many stories about the perils of over-redaction. Time and again the Court has chastised the parties for attempting to redact quotidian bits of agreements and correspondence, noting that the Court is not a "Star chamber."
Today's case, Inkit, Inc. v. Airslate, Inc., C.A. No. 23-793-RGA (D. Del. Mar. 26, 2025), shows that it's also possible to redact too little. The parties thereby had a long-running dispute about trademark infringement which ultimately evolved into a dispute about whether the defendant had violated a settlement agreement which resolved an earlier case between the parties.
That settlement agreement—like literally every other one I've ever seen—contained a confidentiality provision. The issue that arose is that, in …
Local Rule 37.1 seems to often be forgotten. It requires a party bringing a discovery motion (which would include a discovery dispute) to recite or attach the discovery request or responses they are moving about:
Any discovery motion filed pursuant to Fed. R. Civ. P. 26 through 37 shall include, in the motion itself or in a memorandum, a verbatim recitation of each interrogatory, request, answer, response, or objection which is the subject of the motion or shall have attached a copy of the actual discovery document which is the subject of the motion.
Claim narrowing is such a common issue in Delaware that this blog has at least 431 entries with the tag.
(Eds. Note—I did not actually count, but you can click on the tag on the side and scroll down to prove me wrong).
I told it to draw a nerd, but it actually kind of looks like me...must be something wrong with the algorithm.AI-Generated, displayed with permission
Ironically this rich well of precedent can make it kind of hard to brief a dispute on claim narrowing. A dozen cases can be cited for any proposition you might want, which can make it hard to argue for one outcome over another -- especially to a judge that has seen similar disputes so many times before.
Judge McCalla's opinion last week in Aortic Innovations, LLC v. Edwards Lifesciences Corp., C.A. No. 23-158-JPM (D. Del. Mar. 20, 2025), was thus a breath of fresh air as he writes unencumbered by a wealth of his own words on the issue.
In the opinion (which cites to a truly remarkable number of prior Delaware orders on the issue), he dealt with 3 relatively common questions in the district.
First, the parties disputed whether the plaintiff should narrow from 31 asserted claims down to 18 or 15 (I'll let you guess who was proposing which). Judge McCalla went with 18, citing Judge Fallon's Order in Twinstrand Bioscis., Inc. v. Guardant Health, C.A. No. 21-1126-GBW-SRF (D. Del. Oct. 18, 2022), which stated that “a reduction to approximately 20 claims by the deadline for service of final infringement contentions” is “consistent with other case narrowing order[s] from [the District of Delaware].”
Has it really been four years since Nate wrote this article on How to (Attempt to) Redact a Transcript? That post has aged like fine wine, and I still refer to it regularly as a refresher. Andrew has had a few follow-upposts as well. Redacting a transcript can be harder than it looks, as illustrated by Judge Burke's recent oral order.
In Astellas Pharma Inc. et al v. Ascent Pharmaceuticals, Inc. et al, C.A. 23-486, D.I. 166 (D. Del. Mar. 14, 2025), Judge Burke rejected a joint motion to redact portions of a transcript, citing failure to identify the confidentiality and anticipated harms of disclosure with specificity:
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