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An Update on Patent Litigation, the Patent Marketplace, and New Cases
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Monday, January 12, 2026
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Patent Litigation Feature
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The USPTO has prompted increasing pushback over recent changes that have expanded the use of discretionary denials at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) over the past year. As 2025 came to a close, the Federal Circuit denied a series of mandamus challenges to those practices, declining to find violations of due process or other procedural rules through some of those changes. Now, a new mandamus petition filed by Volkswagen (VW) takes a different approach based on the separation of powers, arguing that the USPTO director’s unfettered discretion over America Invents Act (AIA) review institution is an unconstitutional delegation of Congress’s authority to grant patents.
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Last week, Eastern District of New York Magistrate Judge Anne Y. Shields denied a motion for pro hac vice (PHV) admission of William P. Ramey, III of Ramey LLP—for “failure to be forthcoming with the Court”—to appear on behalf of VDPP LLC in its case against ASSA ABLOY (Janam Technologies). Ramey is national lead counsel for VDPP’s sprawling litigation campaign and has run into troubles in the conduct of that campaign as well as many others. Janam Technologies filed a rare “opposition” to a PHV motion, providing notice in a letter to the court of Ramey’s “errors and omissions” concerning those troubles. Within two days of the denial of the PHV motion for Ramey, not only had VDPP voluntarily dismissed its case against Janam Technologies (without prejudice), but so had another Ramey-repped plaintiff, in a separate case filed in the same district.
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Patent Watch
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During the fourth quarter of 2025, RPX flagged multiple new patent campaigns initiated by plaintiffs tied, by public records, to third-party litigation funders, including a prominent litigation finance firm and a hedge fund with a growing footprint in the IP space. Meanwhile, several funded campaigns netted new defendants, and USPTO records made public in Q4 link a newly formed NPE to a well-known IP finance firm.
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New Patent Litigation
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Its last open case having been dismissed in November 2017, Lone Star Document Management, LLC (LSDM) has rebooted its sole litigation campaign with separate cases against Atlassian (1:26-cv-00019), Document Logistix (1:26-cv-00021), Dropbox (1:26-cv-00022), HCL Technologies (HCL America) (1:26-cv-00020), IBM (1:26-cv-00018), and Oracle (1:26-cv-00017), all in the Western District of Texas. The plaintiff asserts a single patent generally related to reviewing multiple documents with particular metadata; the defendants are accused of infringement through the provision of their respective “document and content management and related services”; for Atlassian, over the Confluence 8.0 platform; for Document Logistix, the Document Management by Document Logistix platform; for Dropbox, the Dropbox platform; for HCL, the Connections 8.0 platform; for IBM, the IBM FileNet Content Manager platform; and for Oracle, the Oracle WebCenter Content document management solution.
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FairLight Innovations, LLC has filed an Eastern District of Texas complaint against TCL (TCT Mobile) (2:26-cv-00015), alleging infringement of five patents from three different sources. Targeted is the provision of displays and TVs that incorporate LED, QLED, and QD-MINI LED technologies, including “at least the S2, S3, S4, S5, 3-Series, 4-Series, C8-Series, P6-Series, S-Series, Q-Class, Q5, Q6, Q7, QM7, QM8, and NXTFRAME products, and components thereof (e.g., backlight components)”. With this complaint, Ideahub, Inc., a monetization operation based in Korea, has three campaigns active in the US.
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Blaze Mobile Technologies, LLC (BMT), a Texas entity, has filed an Eastern District of Texas case against Credit Union of Texas (CUTX) (2:26-cv-00009) over patents received from Blaze Mobile, Inc., a Delaware entity based in California, and named inventor Michelle Fisher. Targeted is the provision of mobile banking features within the CUTX mobile app. The declaratory judgment (DJ) action that Charles Schwab filed against Blaze Mobile in the Northern District of California ended this past September, after earlier documents referred to an “expected settlement”. Still active there is the DJ action that Samsung had previously filed, District Judge Edward J. Davila lifting an earlier stay in September and taking a Samsung motion to dismiss under submission in October.
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In a new Western District of Texas complaint, KAIFI LLC accuses Apple (1:26-cv-00023) of infringing a patent received from Intellectual Discovery Co., Ltd. in early December 2025. The asserted patent generally relates to a device with a touch panel and “position detecting portion”, with infringement allegations focused on the provision of products that “implement touch panels with hover detection and control operations”, including certain Apple Pencil and iPad devices. This past August, KAIFI filed a pair of complaints in the same district, one against Alphabet (Google) and the other against Apple.
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For its latest round of complaints, Wolverine Barcode IP LLC hit Chipotle Mexican Grill (2:26-cv-00016), Jamba Juice (2:26-cv-00021), Restaurant Brands International (Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen) (2:26-cv-00023), and Walmart (Sam’s West) (2:26-cv-00024) in the Eastern District of Texas. Doing so in most venues outside of Texas, at least still represented by Ramey LLP, might have been dicey now that multiple courts have denied Ramey LLP’s principal pro hac vice admission, and doing so in the Western District of Texas would have required—under the recently imposed prefiling injunction against Ramey LLP and its principal—permission from the court first.
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In an Eastern District of Texas complaint, NovaCloud Licensing LLC accuses Charter Communications (Spectrum Gulf Coast, Spectrum Management Holding) (2:25-cv-01266) of infringing a set of three former Ericsson patents that overlaps with those already in suit against Amazon, IBM, Meta Platforms, and Microsoft. Targeted is the provision of Spectrum TV services and related products such as mobile apps, stream boxes, and more, with infringement allegations focused on adaptive bitrate streaming, AI-assisted streaming, and targeted advertising.
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BelAir Electronics, Inc. has added a Western District of Texas complaint against Alphabet (Google) (1:26-cv-00011) to those filed separately late last year in the same district against Amazon, Apple, AT&T (AT&T Mobility), Best Buy, Deutsche Telekom (T-Mobile), Target, and Walmart. A family of three patents, asserted in overlapping subsets, has been at issue since this campaign’s launch in July 2020. Targeted is the provision of various mobile device cases.
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In Case You Missed It
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Last fall, Southern District of Texas Judge Alfred H. Bennett granted an Alice motion, dismissing an amended complaint filed by FrameTech LLC against KKR & Co. (BMC Software). FrameTech filed but then withdrew a motion for reconsideration of that ruling, and BMC has filed not just a motion to shift attorney fees but a motion to schedule a hearing on the motion to shift those fees—both of which FrameTech has opposed. BMC asks the court to authorize a 90-day period of postjudgment discovery to identify the principal and litigation funder behind FrameTech so that both may be held jointly and severally liable for the fees that it expects to be shifted.
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Three years after scrutiny from Delaware Chief Judge Colm F. Connolly put a halt to the filing pattern of a web of plaintiffs tied to Texas monetization firm IP Edge LLC, those plaintiffs—at least according to available USPTO assignment records—still hold a large number of US patents. While most of those assets have apparently been sitting still, one such family was divested in late 2023 to unrelated Texas entity Secure Wi-Fi LLC, which did something unremarkable by filing suit over its received assets almost immediately and which came within days of doing something remarkable, at least judged against years of IP Edge patterns and practices, by trying infringement claims over that family to an actual jury.
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William P. Ramey, III of Ramey LLP has filed multiple declarations in support of applications to proceed pro hac vice (PHV) in various courts in which he represents that he has “never been . . . denied admission by any court”. For example, in a case against Here (Here North America) now before Northern District of Illinois District Judge Mary M. Rowland, Ramey did just that. In that affidavit, Ramey also attested that he is “familiar with the Local Rules of the U.S. District Court for the District of Illinois”. Note, however, that last April the Northern District of California denied a Ramey application for PHV admission in a case filed there by Cooperative Entertainment, Inc. against Alibaba. Note also that Northern District of Illinois Local Rule 3.2 requires LLC litigants to file a “Notification of Affiliates”, which the Ramey-repped plaintiff has repeatedly not done.
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