Many courts adjudicating multiple defendant patent cases specify that certain submissions to the court must be made jointly by all defendants. For example, the court may establish a page limit for all defendants for Markman briefing and other common issues. Deciding which defendant will take the lead on which activity and then sorting through comments from all of the different defendants before submission again adds to the email and telephone “noise” for each of the lawyers involved in the case. Because each of the defendants may not know which lawyer for one of their co-counsel is handling what issue, it is very common for all emails amongst a joint defense group to be addressed to all lawyers for each of the different parties. Again, this increases the level of email traffic to each individual attorney, adding costs and making participation in such cases much more time consuming for each defendant and their counsel.
Being a defendant in a multi-defendant patent infringement case provides additional complications for each defendant as well. Among these are the handling of differences, settlement by co-defendants and the timing of these and other issues that must be dealt with by defendants due to the number of parties in the suit. In addition, if the case involves multi-district issues, there are other complications that can arise.
From Brian Buroker,Esq.
