Judge Connolly’s new order provides a concise summary of the Mavexar timeline and announced the date of a long-delayed evidentiary hearing in the Creekview case.
Mark your calendars for Friday, 7/21 at 9:00AM in Courtroom 4B. This hearing was originally slated for December 6, 2022, but it never happened.
Last fall, Judge Connolly ordered a series of evidentiary hearings in approximately a dozen cases to determine whether LLC plaintiffs had complied with his standing order.
According to the Court in his newest order, the first hearing in that series, involving Nimitz, Mellaconic, and Lamplight:
raised serious concerns that the parties may have made inaccurate statements in filings with the Court; that counsel, including Mr. Chong, may have failed to comply with the Rules of Professional Conduct; that real parties in interest, such as IP Edge and a related entity called Mavexar, may have been hidden from the Court and the defendants; and that those real parties in interest may have perpetrated a fraud on the court by fraudulently conveying the patents asserted in this Court to a shell LLC and filing fictious patent assignments with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (PTO), all designed to shield the real parties in interest from the potential liability they would otherwise face by asserting in litigation the patents in question.
After the Court sought more information via document production, Nimitz filed an unsuccessful petition for writ of mandamus. During the Federal Circuit’s review, Creekview secured a stay of its evidentiary hearing (the one scheduled for December 6, 2022) and filed its own unsuccessful petition for writ of mandamus.
The Relevant Stay Lifted Months Ago
But the stay only applied “until such time as the Federal Circuit terminate[d] the stay in connection with the Nimitz Petition.” That condition was met on December 8, 2022 when the Federal Circuit lifted the stay in the Nimitz actions.
In the interim, Nimitz filed an intervening petition for panel rehearing and rehearing en banc, but it was rejected. And several months later, the Court set (then cancelled) a hearing to investigate why Nimitz had still not produced any of the ordered documents. Another evidentiary hearing in Backertop was also set, then modified before it occurred earlier this month.
This is One of Two Back-to-Back Evidentiary Hearings
This evidentiary hearing is one of two. Mr. Jacob LaPray, of Creekview, is ordered to participate in this evidentiary hearing (7/21) one day after Ms. Lori LaPray participates in a similar hearing (7/20) in the Backertop case. According to the CNET Amicus Brief at 17 (shown below), Ms. LaPray is married to Mr. Brandon LaPray—who is an attorney connected with Mavexar—and apparently not the same person testifying at the upcoming Creekview hearing.
That's right. It appears there are three people involved in this saga named "LaPray," and two of them have been ordered to appear in-person, along with Mr. Chong, at the end of July.
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