In February 2023, Northern District of Texas Judge Brantley Starr shifted attorney fees in favor of defendant VMware, ordering ZT IP, LLC to pay VMware $92,130.35 within 30 days of that order. The court deemed the case exceptional, in part, because the accused product was released in 2002, a full year before the application that led to the patent asserted in the case; per Judge Starr, “VMware provided all the information for ZT to quickly realize that it had no claim and that it should have dropped the suit before any of the parties spent unnecessary fees”. Not “a single dime” received from ZT IP by August of last year, VMware propounded post-judgment discovery and filed motions to amend the judgment and to join additional parties, including Dynamic IP Deals LLC (d/b/a DynaIP) and its principal Carlos O. Gorrichategui, Entente IP, LLC and its principal David Ghorbanpoor, Pueblo Nuevo LLC (but not its principal Hernan Arturo Perez Torrijos), and litigation counsel Ramey LLP and its principal William P. Ramey III. By December 2023, though, having expended tens of thousands more dollars trying to collect the fees owed from ZT IP, which VMware characterizes as a “judgment-proof shell company”, VMware withdrew its motions, and just this month, Judge Starr granted Ramey LLP’s motion to withdraw from the suit.

ZT IP, LLC has initiated its first litigation over patents received from Zeidman Technologies this past March, suing VMware (3:22-cv-00970) in the Northern District of Texas and MathWorks (6:22-cv-00438) and National Instruments (6:22-cv-00437) in the Western District of Texas. At issue across the new complaints are virtualization products (VMware) and products related to task management and code generation for real-time operating systems (the others). The VMWare suit was filed in the Northern District of Texas, where local rules require filing parties to identify “a complete list of all persons, associations of persons, firms, partnerships, corporations, guarantors, insurers, affiliates, parent or subsidiary corporations, or other legal entities that are financially interested in the outcome of the case”. ZT IP, a plaintiff with ties to Dynamic IP Deals, LLC (d/b/a DynaIP), for which an individual connected to a venture capital firm has signed, has yet to file its disclosure.