Vringo Attorney Requests Conference With Court To Discuss Litigation With ZTE

In a letter sent out Tuesday, Karl Geercken, serving as Vringo, Inc. VRNG's attorney, requested a conference with the court to discuss the status of two pending litigations against ZTE CORPORATION/strong> ZTCOFZTCOY.

Where The Situation Stands

What's Happened Since Filing

According to the document, under the scheduling order currently in place, the involved parties should have substantially completed document production by Tuesday. However, the attorney explains that: “(1) the parties are still meeting and conferring regarding their disputes over the form of a protective order, (2) the foundational question of whether ZTE needs to provide discovery related to its communications with Chinese regulatory authorities is subject to a pending motion to compel, and (3) the parties have not yet begun to produce documents.”

Related Link: Vringo Offers Update on Litigation, Published Licensed Terms

He then adds that, more importantly, significant events have taken place since the filing of Vringo’s active complaint. These have changed the landscape of the dispute between the parties. “It now is apparent that in addition to using Vringo’s NDA settlement material as the basis for its civil litigation in the Shenzhen courts, ZTE used and referenced that same information to the NDRC in early 2014.

"Now the NDRC has opened an investigation against Vringo, citing ‘prima face’ [sic] evidence submitted to it. In early February, the NDRC issued a fine against Qualcomm, another licensor of cellphone technology, in the amount of $975 million dollars. This second independent breach of the NDA has dramatically increased the harm to Vringo.”

Related Link: February 9: Vringo Is Soaring Over 40% On A Potential ZTE SEttlement

In addition, the attorney explains that the two cases overlap substantially, “both in terms of the parties’ legal positions and in terms of the scope of discovery. ZTE has now taken the position [...] that U.S. courts are empowered to issue injunctions against parties before it, even where those injunctions have direct effects in foreign litigation.”

Moreover, many of ZTE’s outstanding discovery requests “relate to the parties’ pending FRAND dispute, rather than to the breaches of the NDA.”

The company intends to set a date to discuss the status of the pending litigations on April 6 or 7, 2015. The United States Courthouse has yet to respond.