This August 10 decision by Judge Folsom addresses Plaintiff's motion to strike "twenty eight new combinations of prior art" relied upon by Defendants. Plaintiff argues that the combinations were not disclosed earlier as required by the Eastern District of Texas local patent rules, but admits that the underlying references were identified and charted as part of the Defendants' local rules contentions.
Defendants contended that:
The Court analyzed Defendants' argument under the non-exhaustive, five-factor test and determined that supplementation was not warranted. In particular, the Court noted that:
The Court noted that local rule P.R. 3-3(b) requires a disclosure of the combinations that render a claim obvious. Even though the prior art references were previously disclosed, the particular combinations were not disclosed. The Defendants could have avoided this issue had the combinations been disclosed in its preliminary invalidity contentions. For some reason, the combinations were not set forth even though each reference was included in a limitation-by-limitation claim chart in the contentions. As discussed previously, PatDek provides all reasonable prior art combinations for use in preliminary invalidity contentions. The Defendants did analyze the prior art, the specific combinations now relied upon were just not disclosed.
The Court rejected the balance of Defendants' other arguments.
We designed PatDek to specifically handle a substantial number of prior art references and to identify all prior art combinations (two or three-way combinations) that teach all elements of each target claim. At the early stages of litigation, it is very difficult to know the specific combinations that will be important later in the litigation. Because the local rules require an identification of relied upon combinations at this early stage, we designed PatDek to perform this analysis for you.
The PatDek license fee for an entire case is likely to be significantly less than the cost of motion practice directed to excluding your invalidity contentions. Beyond the cost savings, you'll have all of your prior art organized to allow for changes to be made as the case evolves toward the expert and summary judgment phases. Let us know if you would like access to PatDek for a 15 day, no-cost demonstration.