Posts Tagged: "Rodney Gilstrap"

Although patent litigation levels through the first nine months of 2017 have largely remained consistent with patterns from recent years, it does appear that the number of patent suits filed in U.S. district courts has been on a slow decline in recent years. There were a total of 995 patent lawsuits filed in district court during 2017’s third quarter, an 8.4 percent decline when compared to totals from 2016’s third quarter. Year-over-year declines in patent suit filing were also seen in the first and second quarters of 2016 as well. As Lex Machina data scientist Brian Howard notes, 2017 continued a trend in which patent suit filings tend to drop in the first quarter of the year, rise during the second quarter and then fall again during the third quarter. “Historically, that’s a pattern that we’ve seen pretty consistently in the past few years,” Howard said.

In re Cray, Inc., the Federal Circuit applied the recent Supreme Court’s TC Heartland decision to grant a writ of mandamus, directing the Eastern District of Texas to transfer Raytheon’s patent case to a proper venue. The district court refused the transfer based on notions of targeting the district for a benefit, according to a four-part test it adapted from In re Cordis Corp. The Federal Circuit disagreed, holding that the listed criteria were not sufficiently tethered to the relevant statute, 28 U.S.C. § 1400(b)… In determining venue in a patent infringement case, the location of defendant’s employees who work from home is not a regular and established place of defendant’s business when the defendant corporation has no material connection to that place, as by rent, inventory, conditioning employment based on the location, or other relevant facts.

After briefly parsing the statutory language of §1400(b) critical to the decision the Federal Circuit concluded that Judge Gilstrap’s four-factor test was not compliant with the statutory language. Judge Lourie simply concluded: “The district court’s four-factor test is not sufficiently tethered to this statutory language and thus it fails to inform each of the necessary requirements of the statute.”… “The fact that Cray allowed its employees to work from the Eastern District of Texas is insufficient,” wrote Judge Lourie as he shifted to the specifics of the case before the Court.

Unfortunately, the answer may be not as much as many expected. Right after the decision there were 350 motions to transfer or dismiss in the EDTX. But the limitations imposed by TC Heartland have been called into question by a ruling from EDTX Judge Rodney Gilstrap in Raytheon Co. v. Cray Inc. In his decision, Gilstrap denied a motion by Cray seeking to transfer the case to another district in light of TC Heartland. Gilstrap found that the existence of a single employee in the district constituted “regular and established place of business,” and he established a four-factor test to decide whether newer cases belong in the district… As hopeful as some folks were about TC Heartland, it certainly hasn’t stopped NPEs. The IP community must acknowledge this and adjust accordingly – it’s still the wild west out there, for now.

Raytheon, Nokia and Ericsson all filed briefs with the Federal Circuit encouraging the court to decline the Cray mandamus on a motion to transfer from EDTX… Cray is asking the Federal Circuit to decide two issues: did the Eastern Texas court err in holding that a “regular and established place of business” need not be a physical presence; and did the district court err in determining that the residence of a single work-from-home employee constitutes a “regular and established place of business” of his employer.