In December 2018, Empire Technology Development LLC, a subsidiary of Allied Inventors Management, LLC (AIM), granted a security interest in thousands of patent assets to Crestline Direct Finance, a subsidiary of Crestline Investors. Between May 2019 and March 2020, as part of an apparent effort to wind down monetization efforts, Empire Technology has recorded a series of releases of the Crestline security interest over batches of those patents, several of which were inked just before assignment of the batches to third parties, including to both operating companies and NPEs. One of those NPEs has already begun litigating the recently received patent.