Opinion ID: 66830
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Beasley litigation

Text: This litigation was preceded by an initial lawsuit filed by Beasley in the United States District Court for the Western District of Texas, alleging breach of fiduciary duty and negligence. Beasley v. Avery Dennison Corp., No. 04-CA866, 2007 WL 1558621 (W.D. Tex. May 25, 2007). According to the First Amended Complaint filed in this litigation, over the course of discovery in the initial lawsuit, USPPS learned that: (1) Both Avery Dennison and Neil DuChez had been researching his patent application for almost six (6) months before Beasley signed his Power of Attorney to Renner[] Otto and that i[t] was DuChez’s general impression that it would be difficult for Beasley to obtain a patent and if obtained would be relatively weak; (2) Avery Dennison considered his proposed License Agreement laughable and absurd; (3) Avery Dennison only planned on using limited funds to prosecute his patent and they were going to hide these costs; (4) Avery Dennison was leveraging this patent pending process and if the patent protection was meaningless they either would not renew the Supply Agreement or not with a royalty clause; (5) Avery Dennison was restricting Beasley’s access to Neil DuChez and he could do nothing for Beasley without Avery’s approval; and (6) Avery Dennison, Renner[] Otto and DuChez did basically nothing to respond to the second set of rejections from the PTO. (Pl.’s First Am. Compl. 7–8.) During discovery in the initial lawsuit, Avery Dennison and Renner Otto found a document entitled Intellectual Property Assignment (the “Assignment”) that was dated July 3, 2001. According to the document, Beasley transferred all of his intellectual property rights to USPPS. Beasley claimed that he did not recall assigning the rights to USPPS and that he only intended to assign the rights to USPPS after the patent had been issued. The district court concluded 5 that Beasley lacked standing and that USPPS’s Motion to Intervene was tardy. The court thus dismissed the initial lawsuit with prejudice as to Beasley and without prejudice as to USPPS. It also sanctioned Beasley $200,000 for concealing the Assignment from Avery Dennison and Renner Otto.