After last week's joint case management statement in FTC v. Qualcomm (Northern District of California), Qualcomm filed a revised proposed schedule on Monday. Judge Koh had denied a stay of discovery and asked Qualcomm to revise its proposed schedule accordingly. Now Judge Koh has set a schedule that is materially consistent with the FTC's proposal and a lot more ambitious than Qualcomm's revised schedule (this post continues below the document):
17-04-19 FTC v. Qualcomm Case Schedule by Florian Mueller on Scribd
The eight-day bench trial will commence on January 4. Fact discovery will close on March 30, 2018 (which was the FTC's proposal and is three months earlier than Qualcomm's proposal). Up to the August 10, 2018 deadline (for summary judgment and Daubert motions to be filed), it's all consistent with the FTC's proposal, and after that date, Judge Koh's schedule is more ambitious than either party's suggestion: the oppositions and replies concerning summary judgment and Daubert will be due almost two weeks ahead of even the FTC's proposed schedule. Also, the FTC proposed that a pretrial conference be held approximately six weeks after November 16, 2018, but it's now scheduled for December 13, 2018. By contrast, Qualcomm's revised proposal basically came down to a mid-May 2019 pre-trial conference, so Judge Koh's trial date is, on the bottom line, about five months ahead of Qualcomm's.
While I think Qualcomm's arguments for requiring more time weren't all that weak (for example, third-party international discovery can take time), the trial is rather unlikely to be postponed: Judge Koh tends to keep her schedules.
Judge Koh's far-reaching agreement with the FTC on the case schedule doesn't mean anything for how she will ultimately decide the case. I doubt any inclination will become clear before next year, if at all.
Based on my own observations of Judge Koh's handling of patent matters, I believe Qualcomm would be hard-pressed to get a judge who would be more sympathetic to the concerns of patent owners than her. I've dubbed her (with the greatest respect) "the World Wildlife Fund for endangered Apple patents" and didn't mean to suggest that this was because she wanted to help Apple in particular (in some ways she was good for Apple, definitely too good for my taste, but not in all ways, so while I disagreed with her decisions and reasonings on several occasions, there's no reason to assume she ever favors one party over the other). She just appears to be generally overly patentee-friendly because she has too much respect for granted patents. Until a Federal Circuit majority sided with Apple on slide-to-unlock (an outrageous decision in many respects that will hopefully be reversed by the Supreme Court), she was the only judge in the whole wide world to uphold the slide-to-unlock patent. All 15 European judges that looked at it deemed it invalid, and so did a three-judge Federal Circuit panel, which shows what a patentee-friendly outlier Judge Koh can be...
I never liked the fact that she had made statements in public in which she criticized alleged infringers for trying to shoot down patents that, in many cases, shouldn't have been granted in the first place. In that context she expressed a lot of sympathy for patent holders seeking to enforce their rights. That kind of thinking could potentially benefit Qualcomm here, though I do hope she will understand the FRAND-specific issues at the heart of the FTC's case. Fortunately, this isn't an infringement case.
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