In the age of electronic filing, working from home and sheltering in place appears to have accelerated—or at least not slowed down significantly—district court and Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) filings. This week saw a return to form, with 31 new PTAB petitions and 72 new district court complaints. Large district court assertions nearing the one-year bar drove up the PTAB filings; on the district court side, existing non-practicing entities (NPE) campaigns added a fair number of defendants, and a dispute between WSOU Investments, LLC d/b/a Brazos Licensing and Development and Huawei resulted in a half-dozen complaints.

Medtronic has been hit with multiple IPRs by competitor Axonics Modulation Technologies, Inc., another publicly traded medical device company, over sacral neuromodulation solutions. Medtronic sued Axonics in September of 2019 for willful infringement of five related patents, just after Axonics received the welcome news that their product, the Sacral Neuromodulation (“SNM”) System (“r-SNM”) (“Axonics r-SNM System”), had finally been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use in the United States (it had previously been approved in Canada and Europe in 2016). It was granted approval, at least in part, based explicitly on similarity to the now-existing Medtronic® InterStim® Therapy System. The seven IPRs filed this week challenge claims of all seven of the patents asserted in the suit.

On the District Court side, WSOU Investments, LLC d/b/a Brazos Licensing and Development has filed at least another half-dozen complaints against Huawei (bringing it up to 12 total complaints, with some against ZTE) on a portfolio that appears to contain, behind it, upward of 4,200 patent assets of former Alcatel-Lucent/Nokia pedigree, and has been touched by funders Coast Asset Management, Juniper Capital Partners, and appears to be co-run by Uniloc Founder Craig Etchygoyen, though ownership information and interest are hazy based on public assignment records.

And Samsung filed five IPRs against seemingly failed Australian company Kannuu Pty Ltd. on the five related patents that Kannuu asserted against Samsung in district court last May, a few months before the one-year bar in that case. The complaint accused Samsung Blu-ray Players and Smart TVs of infringing the five related patents, all titled “Process And Apparatus For Selecting An Item From A Database;” the patents appear to variously claim directional controls on a graphical user interface (there are other unasserted family members). The company’s website does not appear to have been updated since at least 2016; former executives include capital funders. The complaint also adds a breach of NDA complaint, arguing that the parties were under confidentiality obligations during negotiations circa 2013.