Patent Lawyer Blog
In this patent infringement action, the plaintiff filed a motion for discovery sanctions. The plaintiff argued in its motion that defendant failed to comply with the district court’s October 7, 2015 oral discovery order and related text-only order, in which the district court apparently warned the defendant that failure to comply would result in sanctions.
The district court found that “[n]otwithstanding the amount of discovery that defendant did provide after October 7, 2015, among other failures, defendant failed to disclose requested material information about product redesign and pre-redesign products.” The district court also concluded that Defendant “failed to provide requested material information over which it appears to have had joint control, but that at the least was easily accessible to it on request from third party Sunscreen, notwithstanding the court’s order to defendant to use all of its leverage to obtain this information and defendant’s confirmation that it would do so.”
Based on these discovery failures, the district court ordered that defendant’s number of non-30(b)(6) depositions “is reduced from 10 to 9, and defendant shall pay plaintiff’s reasonable costs in taking defendant’s 30(b)(6) deposition and plaintiff’s costs in making the instant motion.”
The district court “after giving both sides a full chance to be heard, enters an order finding that defendant has failed in a material way to meet its discovery obligations after December 3, 2015, then the court will close defendant’s discovery in this case.”
Cree, Inc. v. Kingbright Electronic Co., Ltd. et al, Case No. 3-14-cv-00621 (W.D. Wisc. Dec. 3, 2015)
The authors of www.PatentLawyerBlog.com are patent trial lawyers at Jeffer Mangels Butler & Mitchell LLP. For more information about this case, contact Stan Gibson at 310.201.3548 or SGibson@jmbm.com.