Arendi S.A.R.L. has seen its long-running litigation campaign trimmed considerably in the past several years through a series of invalidity rulings, and now the Federal Circuit has foreclosed its attempt to avoid a further narrowing of its litigation against LG Electronics (LGE). In late 2020, the District of Delaware struck several portions of Arendi’s expert report on infringement after the plaintiff failed to provide claim charts for all but one of the many accused products as required under the district’s discovery rules. Rather than updating its infringement contentions accordingly, Arendi instead filed a second case against LGE targeting those same products with the same patent. On September 7, the Federal Circuit issued a precedential decision that affirmed the lower court’s dismissal of that second complaint as improperly duplicative.

Eight years after filing litigation against Apple, BlackBerry, HTC, LG Electronics (LGE), Motorola Mobility (then a Google subsidiary), Samsung, and Sony, Arendi S.A.R.L. asked Delaware District Judge Leonard P. Stark to set trial dates (“and potentially up to seven week-long trials four weeks apart beginning in the fall of 2021”). Last week, Judge Stark denied the motion, indicating that a date for a first trial, and perhaps a second trial, will be set once dispositive motions are resolved. Also, last week, in response to a separate order limiting the scope of accused products in its case against LGE, Arendi filed a new Delaware case against that defendant (1:20-cv-01483), asserting the same search patent against a long list of “mobile telecommunication devices, mobile phones, tablets, and other products” turned-away from the earlier suit.

The Federal Circuit has overturned the Patent Trial and Appeal Board’s (PTAB) decision to invalidate an Arendi S.A.R.L. search patent (7,917,843) in an inter partes review (IPR) filed by Apple, Google, and Lenovo (Motorola Mobility) (IPR2014-00208). In an August 10 opinion, the court ruled that the Board had “misapplied” Federal Circuit law on the role of common sense in an obviousness inquiry (2015-2073).

The USPTO instituted inter partes review (IPR) of two Arendi SARL patents (7,496,854, 7,917,843). The IPR proceedings were initiated by Apple, Google, and Motorola Mobility, who along with HTC, LG, Microsoft, Nokia, RIM (Blackberry), Samsung, Sony, and Yahoo, have been sued by Arendi for alleged patent infringement. The two patents originated with Arendi and relate to retrieval of data corresponding to content typed into a field. Apple, Google, and Motorola Mobility jointly filed three petitions in December 2013 requesting that the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) review all the claims of the ‘854 and ‘843 patents.