L&P Convinces the PTAB Not to Institute IPR Trial

The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) ruled today that it would not institute an inter partesreview (IPR) trial requested by Red Hat, Inc.; Dell Inc.; Dell Techs. Inc.; EMC Corp.; Hewlett Packard Enter. Co.; Hitachi Vantara Corp; and Super Micro Computer, Inc. against U.S. Patent No. 6,718,436 owned by L&P client Electronics & Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI).  The patent relates to a logical volume manager for a computer disk storage system. The patent is asserted in infringement litigation brought by the exclusive licensee, Sequoia Technology, LLC against many of the IPR petitioners.  

The petitioners filed the IPR petition asserting five different challenges to the ’436 Patent claims based on five different references.  L&P filed a preliminary response, arguing that trial should not be instituted, and the PTAB agreed.  The case number is IPR2019-00465.

This is not the first time the lawyers at L&P have successfully defended an ETRI patent at the PTAB.  In 2013-2016, L&P lawyers Matt Phillips and Derek Meeker defended ETRI’s U.S. Patent No. 6,978,346 against six IPR petitions filed by Dell, HP, NetApp, VMware, IBM, and Oracle.  L&P convinced the PTAB to deny three of those petitions, won all claims in the trials resulting from the other three petitions, and defended those trial victories on appeal at the Federal Circuit.  In the end, all claims of the ’436 Patent were confirmed as patentable.