Recently recorded patent assignments made public by the USPTO contain noteworthy transfers to multiple plaintiffs now in litigation, including a new source of patents for Apex Beam Technologies LLC, a new source of patents for Pantech Corporation, and a familiar source of patent rights for Crystal Leap Zrt, this time assigning patents directly, though. Movement can also be seen from troubled patent monetization firm IP Edge LLC, as well as movement from various sources to patent broker Allied Security Trust. Take a look.

Ciena (2:23-cv-00089), KKR (BMC Software) (6:23-cv-00165), Micro Focus (4:23-cv-00866), Siemens (6:23-cv-00166), and Zoho (6:23-cv-00167) are the latest defendants to be added to the litigation campaign that Focus Global Solutions LLC (FGS) launched in August 2022 over former IBM patents picked up from Daedalus Blue LLC. The four asserted patents, asserted in overlapping sets, generally relate to providing a “generated device-specific command” to a network device. The defendants are accused of infringement through the provision of their respective network management products.

This past quarter, US patents continued to spread among NPEs, including to familiar faces in patent monetization, and while some of those recipients have yet to file any litigation, several did launch new campaigns during Q3, targeting players in the Networking market sector, wireless carriers, e-commerce or software companies, and device makers, among others.

At the beginning of last month, Focus Global Solutions LLC (FGS) began litigating the former IBM patents that it picked up from Daedalus Blue LLC in July. It sued Broadcom and Dell over one of those patents; Cisco, HP, Extreme Networks, and SolarWinds, over another, all in the Western District of Texas, all on August 3. By the end of the month, only the case against SolarWinds is still on the books, joined now by a new case filed in Delaware against Juniper Networks (1:22-cv-01165).

Following early August dismissals of its cases against Broadcom and Dell, Focus Global Solutions LLC (FGS) has now sued VMware (6:22-cv-00866) in the Western District of Texas over the provision of the vRealize Operations Management Pack for Smart Assurance Adapter solution, with certain data collection features at issue. The plaintiff asserts a single patent generally related to a “storage area network (SAN) comprising one or more regions” that is controlled by a manager which responds to information (e.g., components and interconnectivity) collected by “scanners”.

RPX recently covered the assignment of portfolios to four associated NPEs; ScanComm LLC became the first of the four to file suit, launching a campaign targeting QR code scanning last week. Now, Focus Global Solutions LLC has begun litigating, suing Broadcom (6:22-cv-00830), Cisco (6:22-cv-00831), Dell (6:22-cv-00832), Extreme Networks (6:22-cv-00833), HP (6:22-cv-00834), and SolarWinds (6:22-cv-00836) across two networking campaigns, as a formal matter. Under the new Western District of Texas assignment policy, none of the six suits has been assigned to District Judge Alan D. Albright, landing with, respectively, District Judges James K. Pulliam, David A. Ezra (both Cisco and HP), Frank Montalvo, Orlando L. Garcia, and David Counts.

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.