A Blog About Intellectual Property Litigation and the District of Delaware


Entries for date: October 2022

"Your honor, it's like the movie Groundhog Day, but we're repeating a trial..." AI-Generated, displayed with permission

Judge Williams issued a decision on Monday denying a motion to bifurcate a patent case, rejecting bifurcation where it would increase the total time by three days and involve repeating the same evidence.

The defendant moved bifurcate a five-day patent trial into a three-day jury trial on license issues and then, if necessary, a separate five-day trial on infringement.

The Court did not seem eager to sign up for a three-day trial with a significant risk of a second full trial later—especially one that repeats the same explanations of the technology:

The crux of ASC's position is that a two-day reduction in trial …

Andrew is better at this A.I. thing, mine still appear monstrous
A.I. Generated, displayed with permission

Every protective order I've ever seen has a provision at the end requiring the parties to return or (more likely) destroy any confidential information (with some limited exceptions) from the other party when the case is over. It's generally not a contentious paragraph.

Judge Fallon, however, dealt with a discovery dispute on this issue, that I was surprised had never come up before -- what happens when there are multiple unrelated defendants, as in ANDA cases? Do you destroy the documents when the relevant defendant drops out of the case, or can you keep them until the whole consolidated mess is over and done with?

Per Judge Fallon, the answer is you get to …

Lawyer Objecting
AI-Generated, displayed with permission

At the jury trial in ArcherDX, LLC v. Qiagen Sciences, LLC, C.A. No. 19-1019-MN (D. Del.), the plaintiffs argued for $752,006 in U.S. royalties, and the jury awarded $1,593,762.

The higher number happened to exactly match the $752,006 they asked for for U.S. royalties, plus the lost profits number:

The $1,593,762 U.S. royalty award, however, is much higher than the estimate provided by Plaintiffs’ expert, and, in fact is equivalent to the expert’s suggested award for lost profits ($841,756) plus U.S. royalties ($752,006).

The parties both agreed that it was a mistake, and that the jury had intended to award the $752,006 that plaintiffs had asked for.

Plaintiffs, however, refused to give …