As I noted in August, patent status conferences in Tyler are usually on the afternoon of the first Monday of the month. This month it was afternoon of the second Wednesday, where 37 cases were set for their opening status conference. As with all things post-AIA, the metrics are not exactly straightforward. The 37 cases are perhaps better described as fourteen plaintiffs with serially filed cases, except that's not right either because one plaintiff, Uniloc, while it had ten cases, they were actually three separate patents, one with one case against one defendant, another with two cases against two defendants, and a third with seven cases against seven defendants. The second was a follow-on to a previously filed case, so it got that case's trial setting in 2014, while 1 and 3 got new trial settings in early 2015.
Confused yet? It gets worse because not even the 37 cases is accurate, because some of those had settled before the conference, and other "cases" were actually lead case for serially filed cases that had already been consolidated for pretrial before the status conferences, so the actually number of filings involved is probably in the mid-50's.
The useful factor for me is the trial settings - however many cases or serially filed cases, or consolidated cases there were, it looked to me like sixteen cases (fourteen plaintiffs plus Uniloc II and III) got trial settings (meaning dates for jury selection - as previously noted the post-AIA case defendants get separate trials), with six getting settings (by agreement of the parties at the hearing) on top of prior related cases in 2014, and ten cases getting new settings in March, April or May 2015, i.e. 28-30 months from the status conferences.
How does that compare to recent months? Well, it's basically the same as August, when the new cases were set 27-30 months from the status conference. It's also comparable to September, where 42 cases were heard, receiving 13 trial settings, with only four being new, and those at 29-30 months from the status conference. At that point, none of the cases had been consolidated for pretrial, so it was easy to see that six of the thirteen were "serially filed" with between 2 and 13 defendants/cases each, while seven were single defendant/case.
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