Court Opinion

ID: 9615022
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 04:30:31.993833+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:03:41.662294
License: Public Domain

BRYSON, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
While I do not take issue with most of the majority’s criticisms of the appellant’s presentation in this court, I would not impose sanctions. It is true that E-Pass did not do a good job of identifying those *1381issues on appeal that apply to Palmsource or explaining why particular issues apply to Palmsource despite its seeming lack of involvement in the underlying transactions. However, there is at least one issue as to which E-Pass specifically named Palmsource and as to which it is reasonable for E-Pass to pursue an appeal against Palmsource. That is the issue of whether the district court abused its discretion in awarding fees for periods prior to the alleged misconduct by E-Pass on which the fee award was based. On page 37 of its opening brief, E-Pass asserted that “[t]he District Court’s award of Palm-Source’s and the Visa Defendants’ attorneys’ fees starting from the inception of their respective cases was unreasonable and an abuse of discretion.” Instead of that fee award, E-Pass argued (page 38), “[t]he District Court should have apportioned the fees and awarded only those fees incurred after E-Pass should have dropped the suit, presumably once E-Pass failed to uncover instances of direct infringement.” I disagree with the majority to the extent that it charges that E-Pass failed to identify any reasonable ground for appeal as to Palmsource. As the above-quoted passage indicates, E-Pass identified one such ground. Although we ultimately rejected that argument on the merits, I do not regard it as so frivolous that it warrants the imposition of sanctions.
As to the misrepresentations in E-Pass’s brief, I agree that certain statements in the brief strayed beyond the limits of fair advocacy and into the realm of falsehood. In particular, the district court’s comment, with respect to Visa International, that “E-Pass’ minimalist profiling investigation in and of itself, may not make this case exceptional” cannot fairly be characterized as a finding by the court that, as E-Pass puts it, “E-Pass’s pre-filing investigation was sufficient to avoid making the case exceptional.” The mis-characterization is particularly problematic because, even though the district court’s statement applied only to Visa International, E-Pass at one point included its characterization of the district court’s statement in a passage that references both Palm-source and the Visa defendants.
The other instances of misleading conduct pointed out by the majority are not as serious. The majority faults E-Pass for providing the court with a truncated version of the standard to be used in determining whether a district court may sanction a party by imposing attorney fees. It is true that at page 29 of its reply brief E-Pass used a shorthand version of the standard that omitted an important condition. But earlier in the same reply brief (page 15) E-Pass cited the same authority, and in that reference it set forth the standard with the condition expressly included. It plainly would have been preferable to include the condition in both places, but the inclusion of the condition in connection with the first reference to the cited authority mitigates the effect of omitting it in the later reference.
The majority asserts that E-Pass made the same mistake on page 28 of its opening brief when it argued that “[s]o long as the infringement ‘can reasonably be disputed,’ the infringement action is not exceptional in terms of section 285.” That proposition was included in a portion of E-Pass’s opening brief that was directed to the question whether litigation was brought in bad faith, and E-Pass cited a case that addressed that issue. See Brooks Furniture Mfg., Inc. v. Dutailier Int’l, Inc., 393 F.3d 1378, 1381 (Fed.Cir.2005). In the portion of that case cited by E-Pass, we stated: “Bringing an infringement action does not become unreasonable in terms of [section] 285 if the infringement can reasonably be disputed.” Id. at 1384. Although it is true that the Brooks Furniture case articulated the complete *1382exceptional ease standard — including the “[ajbsent misconduct in the litigation” condition — a few pages before the passage quoted by E-Pass, I do not consider E-Pass’s citation to Brooks Furniture in the context of the issue being discussed at that point in the brief to be misleading. That is particularly so inasmuch as E-Pass’s opening brief elsewhere (pages 24 and 37) acknowledged that litigation misconduct is a proper basis for an exceptional case determination and cited another one of our cases, Beckman Instruments, Inc. v. LKB Produktor AB, 892 F.2d 1547 (Fed.Cir.1989), for that proposition.
As I see it, then, the question for us is whether sanctions should be imposed because of an unduly aggressive characterization of a comment by the district court, a failure to provide the full text of an applicable legal test on the second occasion that the test was set forth, and a failure to explain whether only one issue on appeal was applicable to Palmsource, or if more than one issue was applicable to Palm-source, what the legal basis for Palm-Source’s liability would be. Accepting that in those regards E-Pass’s briefs on appeal fell short of the standards we expect of counsel in this court, I nonetheless conclude that the shortfall is not so egregious as to call for the imposition of sanctions.