Litigation between MISSED CALL, LLC, a Dynamic IP Deals, LLC (d/b/a DynaIP) and Pueblo Nuevo LLC plaintiff, and Twilio has made headlines for several reasons in the past, but now it can be added to the list of matters involving a party represented by Ramey LLP that has missed an important deadline, here to respond to a motion a dismiss. Northern District of California Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler posted an order last Friday noting that MISSED CALL’s opposition (or statement of nonopposition) to Twilio’s motion to dismiss was due on April 8, 2024, but “[n]othing was filed”—ordering the plaintiff to make such a filing, or otherwise request more time, by April 22 at 2 p.m. Among its reasons for issuing the order is “to give notice to the plaintiff of the consequences of not participating in the litigation, including monetary sanctions and dismissal of the case for failure to prosecute it”. The latter consequence has now fallen upon the plaintiff: After MISSED CALL missed this latest deadline as well, Judge Beeler ordered the plaintiff to dismiss the case with prejudice.

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.

Delaware Chief Judge Colm F. Connolly has ordered Jimmy Chong of the Chong Law Firm P.A. and William P. Ramey III of Ramey LLP to attend—in person—a status conference to be held on February 16, 2024. The conference has been set in connection with a case that Ramey (as lead counsel) and Chong (as local counsel) filed on behalf of MISSED CALL, LLC against Twilio back in June 2022. That suit was stayed to await the outcome (now clear) of certain mandamus petitions filed in connection with a set of IP Edge LLC-tied lawsuits before Judge Connolly. After MISSED CALL filed an October 2023 suit against Twilio, substantively identical to the prior Delaware case, counsel for Twilio and Chong submitted separate letters to Judge Connolly, the first seeking a lift of the existing stay and the second to inject some distance from the new filing.

MISSED CALL, LLC has sued 8x8 (3:23-cv-06723) and RingCentral (3:23-cv-06728) in the Northern District of California, asserting the same “missed call” patent at issue throughout this campaign. Three Delaware cases filed by the plaintiff in May 2022 were assigned to Chief Judge Colm F. Connolly, compliance with whose April 2022 standing orders on heightened transparency has more sensationally embroiled Texas monetization firm IP Edge LLC over the past year and a half. However, MISSED CALL’s separate suits against Freshworks, Talkdesk, and Twilio have been stayed in Delaware for over a year, ostensibly to await the outcome of certain mandamus proceedings in the IP Edge cases (although those proceedings have long since ended). A second pair of suits, one against each of Freshworks and Twilio filed last October in the Western District of Texas, prompted counsel to submit letters to Judge Connolly to seek the lift of a prior stay and to distance itself from the West Texas cases, respectively.

In June 2022, MISSED CALL, LLC filed a Delaware case against Twilio that was subsequently assigned to Chief Judge Colm F. Connolly. April 2022 standing orders forced the disclosure of a Panamanian citizen as the sole owner of the Texas plaintiff and litigation counsel Ramey LLP as a provider to MISSED CALL of nonrecourse funding. An evidentiary hearing to explore the accuracy of those disclosures—planned for November 30, 2022, with Hernan Arturo Perez Torrijos (the identified sole owner) and William P. Ramey, III (the named principal of Ramey LLP), along with David Ghorbanpoor and Carlos Gorrichategui, ordered to attend in person—was taken off calendar in light of mandamus appeals by certain IP Edge LLC-tied plaintiffs regarding Judge Connolly’s standing orders. That case has sat stayed since. Now, MISSED CALL has jumpstarted that litigation elsewhere, suing Twilio again (1:23-cv-01294), this time in the Western District of Texas, four days after it hit repeat defendant Mitel Networks (1:23-cv-01281) there as well.

Since late last year, a growing web of plaintiffs associated with IP Edge LLC have become tangled in compliance issues over heightened disclosure requirements imposed by Delaware Chief Judge Colm F. Connolly in a pair of April 2022 standing orders. Now, Judge Connolly has rejected motions from two more IP Edge-linked plaintiffs, Backertop Licensing LLC and Mellaconic IP LLC, that sought to overturn a related set of production orders requiring them to disclose reams of information on their corporate control, assets, and legal representation. Not only did those decisions reject objections related to jurisdiction and allegations of overbreadth, Judge Connolly also ominously suggested that their claims of attorney-client privilege are undercut by the crime/fraud exception—which allows the disclosure of communications between a party and counsel that relate to legal advice used in furtherance of illegal activity.

Over the past several months, several plaintiffs affiliated with patent monetization firm IP Edge LLC have sparred with Delaware Chief Judge Colm F. Connolly over disclosure rules imposed in his courtroom. As this “Series of Extraordinary Events” has unfolded, those plaintiffs have found themselves under close scrutiny due to their apparent failure to disclose information on their management and control in compliance with those heightened rules. Now, one of those entities, Backertop Licensing LLC, has urged the court to halt an order mandating the wide-ranging production of information on those topics until its challenge of that order gets decided—while its attorney is looking for a way off of its cases altogether.

As former top filer IP Edge LLC struggles to extricate itself from the courtroom of Delaware Chief Judge Colm F. Connolly, last April’s standing orders remain in force: one of those orders requiring litigants to disclose details related to any nonrecourse funding arrangements with third parties; and another requiring all “nongovernmental joint ventures, limited liability corporations, partnerships or limited liability partnerships” to include in disclosure statements “the name of every owner, member and partner of the party, proceeding up the chain of ownership until the name of every individual and corporation with a direct or indirect interest in the party has been identified”. Both orders continue to surface information that otherwise would have remained private.

Litigants have been closely watching the “Series of Extraordinary Events” that have been playing out in Delaware as the result of a pair of standing orders issued by Chief Judge Colm F. Connolly in April, which require the disclosure of details on funding and corporate control for parties in his courtroom. Recent weeks have seen a group of related plaintiffs taken to task by Judge Connolly for their noncompliance with these orders, including their failure to disclose links to monetization firm IP Edge LLC and purported consulting firm MAVEXAR LLC—subjecting the NPEs to a series of revelatory evidentiary hearings and imposing a set of sweeping orders requiring some of those plaintiffs to produce a wide-ranging ream of information on their ownership/control, assets, and legal representation. Judge Connolly has now denied a motion to withdraw one of those production orders from one of those plaintiffs, Nimitz Technologies LLC—rejecting it as “devoid of merit”, and ordering it to show cause why he should not sanction the entity for failure to provide the required evidence, as a parallel fight over his probing plays out before the Federal Circuit.

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.