Cases Awarding Fees

  • In re PersonalWeb (Fed. Cir. 11/03/23) (2-1) (aff’g exceptional case finding and award of $5,187,203.99 in attorney fees and costs to Amazon.com, where “a straightforward application of Kessler barred PersonalWeb’s claims,” the claims were “baseless under well-settled claim preclusion precedents,” plaintiff’s “pattern of flipflopping infringement theories”, “PersonalWeb engaged in unreasonable conduct post-claim construction that prolonged” the case, and plaintiff submitted inaccurate declarations); Realtime Adaptive (Fed. Cir. 07/27/22) (aff’g award of fees for “blatant gamesmanship” under trial court’s inherent powers, not Sec. 285); SRI Int’l II (Fed. Cir. 09/28/21) (aff’g award of attorney fees where jury found willful infringement and “Cisco’s entire case was weak, yet it pursued the case aggressively and in an unreasonable manner anyway.”); Pirri (Fed. Cir. 03/23/21) (non-precedential) (based on extreme mis-behavior, aff’g attorneys fees award and awarding appellate fees and double costs); Innovation Sciences (Fed. Cir. 01/05/21) (non-precedential) (aff’g award of fees after claims in eight patents held invalid on pleadings under Alice, and non-infringement was clear post claim constructions, but rejecting proposition that Rule 36 affirmance showed that merits were weak); WPEM (Fed. Cir. 12/09/20) (non-precedential) (aff’g fees award where infringement based on features in version 11 of product manual but version 10 of same manual was prior art and described same features); Blackbird (Fed. Cir. 12/16/19) (aff’g award of fees of full requested amount of $363,243.80 against NPE run by lawyers, which offered increasingly lower and then zero settlement amounts and then without notice voluntarily dismissed with prejudice on day pretrial submissions were due, based in part on weak infringement position, numerous delays in producing documents, and need to deter further similar abusive litigation); Thermolife Int’l (Fed. Cir. 05/01/19) (aff’g fee award based on inadequate presuit investigation (failure to conduct a simple test); finding no error in awarding fees based on issue (infringement) neither fully adjudicated or even fully litigated before the judgment on the merits of invalidity; noting that certain factors district court had cited in support of fee award—licensee at best only minimally practicing patent, suits brought shortly before certain patents expired, many suits filed and settled for small amounts) did not alone support the fee award); SRI Int’l I (Fed. Cir. 03/20/19) (aff’g award of fees based on willfulness finding and overly aggressive litigation, including “maintaining nineteen invalidity theories until the eve of trial but only presenting two at trial and pursuing defenses at trial that were contrary to the court’s rulings or Cisco’s internal documents”), modified (Fed. Cir. 07/12/19) (vacating award of fees because based in part on willfulness finding); Large Audience II (Fed. Cir. 08/20/18) (non-precedential) (aff’g award of $737K in fees and costs including reexamination fees; exceptional case based on (1) untenable opposition to motion to transfer from EDTX; (2) assertion of “objectively weak” arguments to the PTO during reexamination,; and (3) use of a “clear[ly]” privileged email between defendant and its attorneys in its opposition to motion for attorney fees); In re Rembrandt Tech. (Fed. Cir. 08/15/18) (aff’g exceptional case finding but vacating award of $51 MM in fees, where patent owner agreed to give contingent-fee stake in litigation to consultants who were foreseeable fact witnesses “only for their help with a licensing or litigation campaign—and not associated with assignment or license of patent rights, bad faith spoliation, and patent owner should have known asserted patents were unenforceable due to inequitable conduct in revival of expired patents, specifically falsely declaring that failure to pay maintenance fees was unintentional); Raniere (Fed. Cir. 04/18/18) (aff’g fees award based on “‘a pattern of obfuscation and bad faith,’” and positions “‘made in bad faith to vexatiously multiply these proceedings and avoid early dismissal’”); Inventor Holdings (Fed. Cir. 12/08/17) (aff’g district court award of $931,903.45 in “post-Alice attorney fees, including fees incurred during the appeal”); Icon Health (Fed. Cir. 08/25/17) (non-precedential) (aff’g over $1.6MM fee award (which district court granted on remand post Octane Fitness when had denied fees pre Octane Fitness) based on weak claim construction positions, patentee’s litigation conduct intended to raise defendant’s costs, patentee’s insufficient pre-suit analysis, patentee’s non-commercialization of asserted patent and suit being merely for royalties supporting district court’s conclusion that fees were needed to deter further meritless suits); Nova Chem. (Fed. Cir. 05/11/17) (aff’g award of fees where suit was objectively baseless although not brought in bad faith); Bayer Cropscience (Fed. Cir. 03/17/17) (aff’g award of fees against patent owner and licensor, where its interpretation of the license agreement was implausible and contradicted by its own witnesses and statements, it failed to do sufficient due diligence, and filed frivolous preliminary injunction motion in midst of targeted discovery which would debunk its claim); Lumen View (Fed. Cir. 01/22/16) (aff’g exceptional case finding: “allegations of infringement were ill-supported, particularly in light of the parties’ communications and the [patent owner’s own] proposed claim constructions, and thus the lawsuit appears to have been baseless.”); Integrated Tech. II (Fed. Cir. 10/21/15) (non-precedential) (aff’g finding of exceptional case despite plaintiff winning only part of case); Homeland (Fed. Cir. 09/08/14) (non-precedential) (aff’g award of attorneys’ fees against patent owner ivo failure to produce evidence of infringement before the Summ. J. ruling and repeated filing of unsolicited papers).

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