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Plaintiff Glas-Weld Systems, Inc., filed a patent infringement and unfair competition action against defendants Michael P. Boyle, dba Surface Dynamix, and Christopher Boyle. Plaintiff moved for partial summary judgment and to supplement the record, and Christopher Boyle moved to compel depositions of plaintiff’s expert. The district court stayed the partial summary judgment motion pending the ruling on claim construction and ordered that once the court construes the patent claims, the parties could supplement their briefing in support of and in opposition to the motion for partial summary judgment.
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Plaintiffs Scott Clare, Neil Long, and Innovative Truck Storage, Inc. filed a patent infringement action against Defendant Chrysler Group, LLC, arguing that Defendant infringed their patent for hidden pick up truck bed storage. Chrysler Group filed a motion to strike Plaintiffs’ errata sheets from depositions, arguing that Plaintiffs were attempting to materially alter, through the errata sheets, the witnesses’ deposition testimony.

As explained by the district court, Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 30(e) contemplates changing a deposition transcript in “form or substance.” Courts have placed different burdens on a party attempting to change a deposition in substance and have different views of Rule 30(e).
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Plaintiffs filed a motion to permit them to file an affidavit, along with billing documents, under seal. The affidavit, along with its exhibits, was forty-seven pages in length. In the motion, the Plaintiffs contend that “the fees charged for each attorney as well as information contained in the time entries are confidential and private financial information of Plaintiffs and Plaintiffs’ counsel and is not publicly available information.” The district court stated that the Plaintiffs did not cite any case law in support of their position.

The district court then examined the relevant local rules. Local Rule 26.2 states: “Except as otherwise provided by statute, rule, or order, all pleadings and other papers of any nature filed with the Court (“Court Records”) shall become a part of the public record of this Court.” E.D. Tenn. L.R. 26.2(a). In order to seal any part of the record, a party must show good cause. E.D. Tenn. L.R. 26.2(b).
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After a hearing in an Investigation occurred between February 24 and March 7, 2014 and with the parties having submitted their opening post-hearing briefs on March 21, 2014 and their reply post-hearing briefs on March 28, 2014, the Administrative Law Judge determined that supplemental briefing was necessary after the Supreme Court’s decision in Nautilus v. Biosig.

Noting that the final initial determination on violation in the Investigation was currently due to be issued no later than June 20, 2013, the Administrative Law Judge pointed out that “among the material issues involved in this investigation is whether certain claims of the asserted patents are indefinite under 35 U.S.0 ยง 112.”
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Two weeks earlier, the court excluded the expert opinion and testimony of Plaintiff Golden Bridge Technology’s (“GBT”) damages expert. Nonetheless, the court gave GBT one week to submit a new report based on a new theory. After GBT met its deadline, Apple moved to exclude the second report as well.

As explained by the court, “Apple’s motion points out several of the significant flaws in Schulze’s current report: (1) Schulze improperly and sub silencio allocated the entire value of Apple’s portfolio licenses with Ericsson and Nokia to a tiny subset of a subset of a subset of a subset of the patents and standards in those portfolios; (2) Schulze improperly tripled the per-unit rate that Apple would have paid to GBT based on purely academic articles; (3) Schulze improperly failed to compare the patent-in-suit’s technical merits to those of other standards essential patents and (4) Schulze improperly failed to allocate any value to the non-license terms of the Ericsson and Nokia agreements.”
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Echostar Satellite L.L.C. (“Echostar”) moved to compel the production of settlement agreements from the plaintiff. Several issues arose on the motion, including whether the Magistrate Judge had jurisdiction to grant the motion even though the discovery cutoff date had passed, whether a party has an obligation to supplement its prior production with documents that were not created until after the discovery cutoff, and whether the settlement agreements were responsive to the prior document requests.

Turning to the first issue, the court found that it had jurisdiction because of an extension due to a mediation date. “Ordinarily, any motion concerning discovery must be filed sufficiently in advances of the discovery cutoff to allow any production to be completed prior to the cutoff date. Here, however, the parties had obtained an extension of the mediation date from the District Judge in order to allow the instant motion to be decided before the mediation. The Court concludes that, given the foregoing, it has jurisdiction to entertain the instant motion.”
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In this patent infringement action, a dispute arose over whether the defendant B/E Aerospace could rely on declarations from one or more of the inventors of the asserted patent in support of its claim construction position. As explained by the district court, “[i]n the Joint Claim Construction Statement (“Joint Statement,” ECF No. 45) filed on May 9, 2014, Plaintiff MAG Aerospace Industries, Inc. (“Plaintiff”) and Defendant B/E Aerospace, Inc. (“Defendant”) dispute whether, in its claim construction briefing, Defendant may rely on declaration evidence from one or more of the individuals named as inventors on U.S. Patent Nos. 6,353,942; 6,536,054; and 6,536,055 (the “Asserted Patents”).
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In these patent infringement actions, the defendants moved to transfer to three different district courts. As explained by the district court, “[t]here are currently six pending actions in the District of Delaware involving LifePort, LifeScreen, or both. All of the infringement cases involve technology pertaining to the field of minimally invasive vascular repair and many of the actions share overlapping patents-in-suit, which will require claim construction. LifePort has asserted the most patents against the defendant W.L Gore & Associates, Inc. (“Gore”), which must be litigated in this district because Gore is a Delaware corporation with its principal place of business in Newark, Delaware. Five of the patents asserted against Gore overlap with the defendant Endologix, Inc. (“Endologix”). LifePort has also asserted another patent against Gore that overlaps with the defendants Medtronic, Inc. and Medtronic Vascular, Inc. (collectively, “Medtronic”). Similarly, LifeScreen has asserted a patent against C.R. Bard, Inc. and Bard Peripheral Vascular, Inc. (collectively, “Bard”), and Cook Incorporated and Cook Medical Incorporated (collectively, “Cook”), but Bard has not sought transfer.”
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After the district court issued a Markman ruling, the parties informed the court that they had reached an agreement in principle to settle the action. The plaintiff, FlatWorld, then moved to vacate the claim construction order. The district court noted that it had only adopted FlatWorld’s proposed construction for one out of nine terms. “Now plaintiff FlatWorld Interactives LLC wants me to vacate the claim construction order, in which I adopted only one of its proposed constructions out of nine terms to be construed, because it is concerned about the potential collateral estoppel effects of my order in two actions pending before the United States District Court for the District of Delaware.”

The district court then explained that Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 60 provides that a court may relieve a party from an order if “applying it prospectively is no longer equitable” or for “any [ ] reason that justifies relief.” FED. R. CIV. P. 60(b). “Although the Court may vacate an order upon settlement there is no requirement to do so; otherwise any litigant dissatisfied with a trial court’s findings would be able to have them wiped from the books.” White v. Shen, No. 09-cv-989-BZ, 2011 WL 2790475, at *1 (N.D. Cal. July 13, 2011) (internal quotation marks omitted). A “district court can decide whether to vacate its judgment in light of ‘the consequences and attendant hardships of dismissal or refusal to dismiss’ and ‘the competing values of finality of judgment and right to relitigation of unreviewed disputes.'” Dilley v. Gunn, 64 F.3d 1365, 1371 (9th Cir. 1995).
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Plaintiff Trading Technologies International, Inc. (“TT”) moved to strike the invalidity expert report of the defendant, CQG. TT made two arguments its motion: “(1) that Dr. Mellor failed to conduct a proper written description analysis because, according to TT, he incorrectly focuses on features that are not recited in the claims and concludes that there is no written description to support the unclaimed features; and (2) that Dr. Mellor failed to consider the perspective of one of ordinary skill in the art in his written description analysis.”

CQG responded that TT mischaracterized Dr. Mellor’s opinions and that Dr. Mellor correctly applied the written description test to determine whether a person of ordinary skill in the art would understand whether the inventors were in possession of TT’s asserted Static Limitation. CQG further asserted that TT misrepresented Dr. Mellor’s explanation of a person of ordinary skill in the art and offered no explanation why the district court should adopt TT’s definition.
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