Last September, District Judge Gregory B. Williams took the federal Delaware bench, alongside Chief Judge Colm F. Connolly and Judges Richard G. Andrews and Maryellen Noreika, after Judge Leonard P. Stark left to join the Federal Circuit. Delaware has long been one of the busiest venues for patent litigation; it is therefore no surprise that six months into his tenure Judge Williams has now faced and resolved a good number of issues arising from the patent portion of his docket. In that time, with several trials on the horizon, he has issued multiple claim construction rulings; considered and resolved multiple Alice challenges; addressed discovery related to a third-party litigation funder; navigated, at least initially, a potential standing issue arising from the international source of patents that the plaintiff purportedly acquired through a receivership; and refused to enter a default judgment because the plaintiff’s pleading in the complaint “can charitably be described as sparse”, too sparse to establish infringement even upon default.

Evidence of IP Edge LLC’s frequent practice of naming individuals—seemingly with no discernible connections to patent monetization—as managers or managing members of its various LLCs has long been reported by RPX. Now, with Amazon having recently brought that practice to the attention of Chief Judge Colm F. Connolly, and with a raft of amended disclosures filed on the same day last week by a handful of apparent IP Edge plaintiffs litigating before that same judge, the coming months may see the full extent of that setup, and its bearing on standing, come to light.

IP Edge LLC affiliate Mentone Solutions LLC has added a second round of cases to its campaign targeting devices with Dual-Carrier HSPA+ capability. The new defendants are Airbus Space and Defense (1:18-cv-03321), ASUSTek (3:18-cv-07749), CradlePoint (1:18-cv-02041), NetComm Wireless (1:18-cv-02040), and Peplink (3:18-cv-07754), the complaints identifying as accused products the Airbus Tactilon Dabat, ASUSTek’s ZenFone 4 Pro Zs551K; CradlePoint’s MC400 modem; and certain routers of NetComm and Peplink, respectively. With the transfer of the prior case against Acer to the Western District of Texas, this campaign now proceeds in multiple districts, including the Eastern District of Texas, the Northern District of California, the District of Delaware, and the District of Colorado.

IP Edge LLC has launched a fourth litigation campaign based on one or more of the 30 plus former Panasonic patents that the Texas monetization firm acquired from Allied Security Trust (AST) in January 2017. Mentone Solutions LLC, formed in mid-September, has filed suit against Acer (2:18-cv-00443), Inseego (1:18-cv-02767), MVG (1:18-cv-01713), NETGEAR (1:18-cv-01714), TCL (2:18-cv-00444), and T-Mobile (2:18-cv-00445) over a patent generally related to packet transmission in TDMA (time division multiple access) wireless networks. Targeted are devices with Dual-Carrier HSPA+ capability, the complaints calling out Acer’s Swift 7 laptop, Inseego’s SA2100 modem, MVG’s NeptuLink, NETGEAR’s LTE modems (e.g., LB2120), TCL’s LINKZONE hotspot, and T-Mobile’s Rocket 3.0 4G modem.