CAFC Faults Expert Testimony in Reversal of Infringement Finding Against AT&T/ Nokia

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued a precedential decision Wednesday reversing a district court’s denial of judgment as a matter of law (JMOL) of non-infringement and vacating a damages award in favor of Finesse Wireless LLC. The CAFC said there was a lack of substantial evidence to support the jury’s verdicts finding AT&T Mobility and Nokia (AT&T) infringed two of Finesse’s radio signal interference mitigation patents.

Finesse owns U.S. Patent Nos. 7,346,134 and 9,548,775, both generally directed to “methods for mitigating intermodulation product (IMP)1 interference in radios.”

With respect to the ‘134 patent, the CAFC agreed with AT&T that Finesse “failed to show the accused radios sample the ‘signals of interest’ and ‘interference generating signals,’” mostly due to Finesse’s expert’s misinterpretation of a Nokia technical document depicting how the accused radios operate.

While the jury found all of the asserted claims of the ‘134 patent were infringed following Finesse’s expert testimony, and the district court upheld the verdict, the CAFC called the expert’s testimony “confusing and unclear” even after he was made aware of his mistake, which had to do with a misreading of the document’s legend.

Finesse attempted to explain the misimpression, but the CAFC said “[t]his sort of confusing change of course is not sufficient to support the jury verdict. When the party with the burden of proof, such as Finesse, rests its case on an expert’s self contradictory testimony, we may conclude the evidence is insufficient to satisfy that standard.”

As to the ‘775 patent, the CAFC similarly found that the expert’s reliance on a Nokia technical document to show that the accused radios perform seven claimed multiplications was insufficient.

While the CAFC disagreed with AT&T’s argument that Finesse surrendered claim scope over two signals by amending its claims during prosecution to cite “three signals,” instead of “two or three signals,” the appellate court agreed that Finesse’s attempt to clarify the mapping of the document’s multiplications onto the claimed multiplications was “flawed,” and no reasonable jury could have found the accused products perform the seven claimed multiplications.

Because the CAFC reversed the denial of JMOL of non-infringement for both patents, it also vacated the jury’s damages award of $166,303,391 to Finesse.