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Federal Circuit Greenlights Judge Connolly’s Production Order, Related Hearings Set to Resume This Week

December 11, 2022

In April of this year, Delaware Chief Judge Colm F. Connolly posted two standing orders imposing heightened disclosure requirements—regarding party ownership and any third-party litigation funding—on litigants in his courtroom. The responsive disclosures from certain plaintiffs, associated with various notable patent monetization players, have spawned intense scrutiny from the court, including a series of evidentiary hearings followed by an order requiring the production to the court of documents governing the relationships between those plaintiffs and those monetization outfits, together with related communications. Four of the plaintiffs then filed separate petitions for writs of mandamus with the Federal Circuit, prompting Judge Connolly to take certain additional hearings off calendar, to stay some of these cases, and to submit a memorandum to the appeals court, “explain[ing] more fulsomely and in writing” the reasons for this series of extraordinary events. This past week, (1) the Federal Circuit denied two of those petitions, (2) a denied petitioner filed a motion before Judge Connolly seeking the withdrawal of his explanatory memorandum (as well as recusal from its cases going forward), (3) defendants and amici filed responses to the other two petitions still pending before the appeals court, and (4) VLSI Technology LLC and Intel provided their answers to four related questions that Judge Connolly posed in the Delaware case between the two, in advance of a December 14 hearing.


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