Last October, an Eastern District of Texas jury returned a mixed verdict awarding Ollnova Technologies Limited $11.5M from defendant Generac Holdings (ecobee) as a “lump sum royalty for the life of the patents” found infringed. A question concerning the second step of the Alice analysis of one of the patents-in-suit was submitted to that jury, which answered in Ollnova’s favor. Through its posttrial motions, ecobee asked Chief Judge Rodney Gilstrap to enter judgment as a matter of law in its favor as to that patent. The court has now refused, indicating that while the court ruled that its asserted claims—each considered “as a whole”—are drawn to an abstract idea as a matter of law, the jury considered the elements of those claims—individually or as an ordered combination—and reasonably found that ecobee failed to prove everything there to be merely conventional.

This past October, an Eastern District of Texas jury returned a mixed verdict awarding Ollnova Technologies Limited $11.5M as a “lump sum royalty for the life of the patents” found infringed. Judgment has yet to be entered against defendant Generac Holdings (ecobee), though, as last week Chief Judge Rodney Gilstrap set a bench trial on February 27 to hear evidence concerning the “remaining disputes” between the parties after mediation failed to bring the case to a close after the jury verdict. Early in the case, in September 2022, Judge Gilstrap ruled that the asserted claims of one of Ollnova’s patents are directed to an abstract idea but indicated that factual issues underlying the second prong of an Alice analysis needed “further development” via “discovery and motion practice”—now, the court has the benefit of an East Texas jury’s analysis of the issue.

The Federal Circuit has for the first time interpreted a closely watched decision on venue from the Fifth Circuit, the regional circuit that determines the applicable law governing convenience transfers in Texas patent cases. That October 2022 ruling, In re: Planned Parenthood, appeared to depart from the Federal Circuit’s prior take on issues central to the analysis of such transfer motions, including the location of evidence, the cost of attendance for witnesses, and the district judge’s overarching discretion over such matters. However, the Federal Circuit’s precedential In re: Google opinion, issued on February 1, argues that Planned Parenthood does not undercut its current approach. In Google, the court held that a clear showing that a venue is more convenient takes precedence over the district judge’s discretion. Even more significantly, the Federal Circuit determined that NPEs do not have an interest in getting cases to trial quickly—and that a district judge lacks the discretion to give undue weight to his district’s time to trial. The opinion reversed another transfer denial from Western District of Texas Judge Alan D. Albright, and comes months after Judge Albright began attempting to fill the gap with his own reading of Planned Parenthood.

Ollnova Technologies Limited, a plaintiff associated with Dublin-based monetization firm Atlantic IP Services Limited, has expanded the litigation campaign that it began last month, suing Emerson Electric (Verdant Environmental Technologies) (6:22-cv-00358) and Resideo Technologies (6:22-cv-00390) in separate Western District of Texas complaints. The campaign targets the provision of smart thermostats with five former Siemens patents. Meanwhile, prior defendant ecobee has responded to the March 2022 complaint against it with a motion to dismiss on Alice grounds, as well as with a motion to transfer for convenience, from East Texas to West Texas, focusing its brief on Ollnova’s litigation counsel, Russ August & Kabat (“RAK”). Per ecobee, that law firm “has an extensive history of suing ecobee, Google and other smart thermostat companies on behalf of its clients in the Western District of Texas”, with the defendant further asserting that “since 2019 ecobee and Google alone have litigated at least 13 cases against RAK in the Western District”.

Atlantic IP Services Limited has begun litigating the former Siemens patents that it received from a Fortress Investment Group LLC vehicle this past October. The Dublin-based monetization firm’s Ollnova Technologies Limited has filed suit against Alphabet (Google) (6:22-cv-00246) in the Western District of Texas, Carrier (9:22-cv-80388) in the Southern District of Florida, and ecobee (2:22-cv-00072) in the Eastern District of Texas, targeting the respective provision of various smart home products (primarily thermostats) with overlapping subsets of five such former Siemens patents. With these suits, Ollnova joins eight other Atlantic IP entities to litigate former operating company assets, including Arigna Technology Limited, which recently added a case against TCL (6:22-cv-00217) to one of its many such campaigns, and Sonraí Memory Limited, which just hit AMD (6:22-cv-00229) with a former Atmel patent following additional lawsuits filed against existing defendants Amazon (6:22-cv-00225), Dell (6:22-cv-00188), Kingston Technology (6:22-cv-00192), LG Electronics (LGE) (6:22-cv-00187), and Samsung (6:22-cv-00189).

In December, RPX noted an assignment directly from Siemens to an Irish NPE associated with the monetization firm Atlantic IP Services Limited. Since then, another transfer of Siemens patents to the same assignee has appeared among USPTO records—this one having passed through Marathon Patent Group, Inc. and Fortress Investment Group LLC before landing in Atlantic IP’s hands.

Last month, RPX flagged the movement of patents from L3Harris to multiple Irish NPEs associated with the monetization firm Atlantic IP Services Limited. Now, another divestiture from L3Harris to Atlantic IP has appeared among USPTO records, as well as a recent assignment from Siemens.