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.

Verizon (Yahoo) (1:23-cv-00301) is the latest defendant to be added to the sole litigation campaign launched by InvesTrex LLC—a plaintiff connected with a familiar patent monetization figure—in August 2022. InvesTrex has asserted a single patent generally related to automatically converting ticker symbols entered by users in a "social network" message to a hyperlink containing a "synoptic display" of financial data corresponding to the financial instrument. The new District of Delaware case joins other complaints filed there (against Apollo Global Management, Bloomberg, News Corporation, Seeking Alpha, and StockTwits), where InvesTrex has yet to docket a response to Chief Judge Colm F. Connolly’s April 2022 standing orders imposing heightened disclosure requirements regarding party ownership and certain third-party litigation funding.

With the first half of 2022 in the rearview, a list of the year’s top NPEs—by number of defendants added to litigation—is coming into focus. A web of plaintiffs, tied by their association with a single patent monetization professional, appears poised to land on that list, having collectively added more than 30 defendants to litigation so far this year. Given the pipeline of patents apparently flowing into the same operation, its trajectory looks likely to continue through the second half of 2022.