District of Delaware Judge Gregory B. Williams has ruled that cases filed against eHarmony and The Meet Group are exceptional, justifying a shift of attorney fees. Wireless Discovery LLC initially sued over a single patent directed to the abstract idea of “allowing people using mobile devices to share personal information over a network (i.e., a social network)”. Among other problems, the court noted, “This was not a close patent eligibility case” but “faced with the authority demonstrating the weakness of the ‘875 patent, Wireless Discovery doubled down”. An accounting of the fees to be shifted is to be “determined later”.

Last September, District Judge Gregory B. Williams took the federal Delaware bench, alongside Chief Judge Colm F. Connolly and Judges Richard G. Andrews and Maryellen Noreika, after Judge Leonard P. Stark left to join the Federal Circuit. Delaware has long been one of the busiest venues for patent litigation; it is therefore no surprise that six months into his tenure Judge Williams has now faced and resolved a good number of issues arising from the patent portion of his docket. In that time, with several trials on the horizon, he has issued multiple claim construction rulings; considered and resolved multiple Alice challenges; addressed discovery related to a third-party litigation funder; navigated, at least initially, a potential standing issue arising from the international source of patents that the plaintiff purportedly acquired through a receivership; and refused to enter a default judgment because the plaintiff’s pleading in the complaint “can charitably be described as sparse”, too sparse to establish infringement even upon default.

On April 6, 2022, Western District of Texas Judge Alan D. Albright dismissed with prejudice the inaugural case in the dating app campaign of Wireless Discovery LLC. One week later, the inventor-controlled plaintiff shifted venues, suing Coffee Meets Bagel (1:22-cv-00478), Down APP (1:22-cv-00479), HILY (1:22-cv-00482), The League App (1:22-cv-00483), ParshipMeet (eHarmony, The Meet Group) (1:22-cv-00480, 1:22-cv-00484), San Vicente (Grindr) (1:22-cv-00481), and Zoosk (1:22-cv-00485), all in the District of Delaware. While the number of defendants sued has jumped in this campaign, the number of patents asserted has dropped, from four to just one.