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.

Delaware District Judge Leonard Stark has held another “Section 101 Day”, an experimental practice unique to his district under which a judge hears multiple Alice motions from unrelated cases on a single day and issues oral rulings from the bench, one after another. This time around, Judge Stark rejected three patent eligibility challenges, including two against NPE patents and another against a patent asserted by an operating company. The consolidated ruling comes the same week that Judge Stark faced questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee for his nomination by President Joe Biden to fill a soon-to-be-open seat on the Federal Circuit.

Inventor-controlled Consumeron, LLC has filed its first patent case, accusing Maplebear (d/b/a Instacart) (1:21-cv-01147) of infringing multiple patents through the alleged use of a “mobile delivery agent system” in the Instacart platform. Comprising a four-member family, the asserted patents generally relate to the “remote acquisition and delivery of goods”. Among the patents’ named inventors is Mark B. Barron, identified as Consumeron’s president and CEO.