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IP Edge-Tied Plaintiff Produces Documents and a Privilege Log in Delaware
Patent Litigation Feature
Delaware Chief Judge Colm F. Connolly reset the deadline to March 14 for Swirlate IP LLC, a plaintiff tied to Texas monetization firm IP Edge LLC, to produce to the court documents related to whether its counsel—Chong Firm PA and David R. Bennett of Direction IP Law—obtained informed consent from Swirlate before filing and settling cases on its behalf. This past week, Swirlate made that production to the court, its counsel submitting a letter, partially redacted on the docket, that characterizes the purpose of the court’s retained jurisdiction as an “ethics investigation” that must be conducted confidentially and that maintains assertions of privilege (attorney-client and “community of interest”, as well as the attorney-work product doctrine) over some of the documents sought.
March 15, 2024
Judge Connolly Dismisses DJ Complaint Missing a Fraud-Related Claim
In Case You Missed It
Delaware Chief Judge Colm F. Connolly has dismissed a declaratory judgment action filed by Power Integrations against Texas monetization firm IP Edge LLC; its “consulting” arm MAVEXAR LLC; an IP Edge-tied plaintiff Waverly Licensing LLC; and an IP Edge-tied intermediary Array IP LLC. The court notes that the complaint in question contains only a claim for a declaratory judgment of noninfringement of a single wireless charging patent, a claim mooted by the pack of covenants not to sue granted to Power Integrations by the four named defendants. Given the language of the dismissal memorandum, had Power Integrations pleaded “a RICO count with mail or wire fraud predicates”, the outcome might have been different.
March 15, 2024
Recent Patent Assignments Foreshadow Litigation from Players Old and New
Patent Market, Patent Watch
Recorded patent assignments recently made public reveal patents on the move, to an NPE that appears to be collecting assets from a familiar source as prior litigated patents run into PTAB trouble; to an entity managed by what appears to be a relatively new monetization operation standing up; to a recent entrant into the litigation funding space; to entities associated with a frequent plaintiff-side law firm in Texas; and to a host of other plaintiffs recently filing suit.
March 1, 2024
Motion for Clarification and “Scheduled Procedures” Push Off Additional Delaware Scrutiny
In Case You Missed It
Delaware Chief Judge Colm F. Connolly has recently returned attention to certain plaintiffs that had filed cases before him, cases that became tied up in concerns about compliance with his April 2022 standing orders late that year but had been sliding under the radar. In mid-January, the court questioned two attorneys about representation of an additional pair of plaintiffs tied to Texas monetization firm IP Edge LLC, subsequently ordering one of those plaintiffs to produce to the court a set of documents designed to determine whether ethical violations occurred in the conduct of the suits before him. Separately, the court set a status conference in a case filed by MISSED CALL, LLC, requiring counsel to appear in person, after that plaintiff began suing the same defendants elsewhere. Now, events have stalled both inquiries.
February 18, 2024
IP Edge’s Bishop Display Keeps Filing in Couplets
New Patent Litigation
Bishop Display Tech LLC has filed two cases against LG Display, LG Electronics (LGE), and WOOREE BIO (New Optics) together in a pair of Eastern District of Texas complaints (2:24-cv-00084, 2:24-cv-00085) and Heesung Electronics in another pair of complaints (2:24-cv-00086, 2:24-cv-00087) in the same district. The plaintiff, managed by the three principals of Texas monetization firm IP Edge LLC, targets the provision of thin-film-transistor liquid-crystal displays (TFT-LCDs), as well as products incorporating the accused TFT-LCDs (e.g., liquid crystal modules (LCMs), monitors, smartphones, tablets, and TVs).
February 10, 2024
A First 2024 Look at Notable Patent Assignments
Patent Market, Patent Watch
Recently recorded patent assignments made public by the USPTO contain noteworthy transfers to multiple plaintiffs now in litigation, including a new source of patents for Apex Beam Technologies LLC, a new source of patents for Pantech Corporation, and a familiar source of patent rights for Crystal Leap Zrt, this time assigning patents directly, though. Movement can also be seen from troubled patent monetization firm IP Edge LLC, as well as movement from various sources to patent broker Allied Security Trust. Take a look.
February 4, 2024
Judge Connolly Questions Counsel’s Grasp of Informed Consent, Agency Law, and Even Basic English
Top Insight
Delaware Chief Judge Colm F. Connolly ended 2023 in dramatic faction, detailing his findings that patent monetization firm IP Edge LLC, a related consulting firm, and the individuals behind them had together engaged in a sweeping “fraud” through their unusually structured patent assertion model. That order teed up various “consequences” for those involved, among them a set of disciplinary referrals for the attorneys representing the IP Edge-linked plaintiffs under scrutiny based on a variety of professional rule violations. Now, Judge Connolly has grilled the attorneys for two more of the plaintiffs in IP Edge’s web about whether they engaged in some of the same ethical violations—including one of the same litigators tagged in the court’s prior decision, Jimmy Chong (of Chong Firm PA), as well as his cocounsel David Bennett (of Direction IP Law). In a January 17 hearing, an increasingly irritated and incredulous Judge Connolly questioned their grasp of the legal and ethical issues at play, concluding that Chong had earned a second disciplinary referral, and ordering a conspicuously forgetful Bennett to produce documents in order to lay out some basic facts.
January 21, 2024
Funding Appears to Have Fueled Leading Volume NPE Filers, Present and Past
Patent Litigation Feature, TPLF
Into and through 2022, plaintiffs associated with Texas monetization firm IP Edge LLC, taken collectively, had been the top filer of NPE litigation, by orders of magnitude, for years. Transparency imposed by April 2022 standing orders from Delaware Chief Judge Colm F. Connolly, however, generated a “Series of Extraordinary Events” (involving multiple failed mandamus petitions, arguably intemperate rhetoric, civil contempt charges, and ongoing referrals to the US Department of Justice, the USPTO, and state regulatory bodies for potential investigation and/or disciplinary proceedings) that brought IP Edge-tied filings to a complete standstill at the end of 2022—all of which has led a new enterprise to land atop that list of prolific filers of NPE litigation for 2023.
January 21, 2024
Judge Connolly Calls Counsel for Other IP Edge-Tied Plaintiffs in for Questioning
In Case You Missed It
In a November 27, 2023 order, and a set of subsequent letters, Delaware Chief Judge Colm F. Connolly referred certain attorneys employed by Texas monetization operation IP Edge LLC (which is not a law firm) to a Texas disciplinary body for the unauthorized practice of law, also referring local and lead counsel for certain LLC plaintiffs before him to state disciplinary bodies for improperly treating IP Edge as their true client. Those LLC plaintiffs are Lamplight Licensing LLC, Mellaconic IP LLC, and Nimitz Technologies LLC. Now, one of the referred attorneys—Jimmy Chong of Chong Law Firm PA—has been ordered, alongside co-counsel (David Bennett of Direction IP Law), to appear next week before Judge Connolly. The court has warned that both attorneys must be “prepared to address the Court’s concern” that the “same improprieties” prompting the referrals “may have occurred in connection with the litigation” in additional IP Edge-linked cases, namely, those filed by Swirlate IP LLC and by Waverly Licensing LLC.
January 7, 2024
Persistent “Mystery” in Retainer Agreement Scrutinized by Judge Connolly May Not Be Much of One
In Case You Missed It
Chief Judge Colm F. Connolly referred two lawyers to the Office of Disciplinary Counsel for The Supreme Court of Delaware on December 1, 2023 for having given the court “reason to believe” that they had “violated numerous provision of the Model Rules of Professional Conduct”. One of them, Jimmy Chong of Chong Law Firm PA, produced to the court a retainer agreement with IP Edge LLC-tied plaintiff Lamplight Licensing LLC “‘made this 28th day of March, 2022’ . . . about four months after Mr. Chong filed the first three Lamplight cases in this Court and one month after he filed a motion to voluntarily dismiss one of those cases”. Among various “noteworthy” aspects of that retainer agreement is the presence of three unexplained letters—“NWM”—in a section of it that the court characterizes as “remain[ing] a mystery”.
December 17, 2023