On June 16, 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (“CAFC”) vacated a $300 million damages award because the district court used a flawed verdict form, which included only a single, blanket question as to infringement when the case involved five asserted patents.
Optis Cellular Tech., LLC v. Apple Inc., No. 2022-1904, 2025 WL 1680253 (Fed. Cir. June 16, 2025).
In 2019, following unsuccessful negotiations, Optis Cellular Technology, LLC, Optis Wireless Technology, LLC, PanOptis Patent Management, LLC, Unwired Planet International, Ltd., and Unwired Planet, LLC (collectively, “Optis”) sued Apple Inc. (“Apple”) in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas for infringement of five patents that include technology deemed essential to the Long-Term Evolution (“LTE”) standard, used in telecommunications. The accused products are LTE-capable iPhones, iPads, and Apple Watches.
A jury trial was held in August 2020. Leading up to trial, both parties requested that the district court include on the jury verdict form a question regarding infringement for each of the five asserted patents. However, the district court rejected those requests and included only a single question on infringement:
Did Optis prove by a preponderance of the evidence that Apple Infringed ANY of the Asserted Claims?
By contrast, in the section of the verdict form on invalidity, the questions were broken up on a claim-by-claim basis. The jury returned a verdict for over $500 million in damages, which was subsequently reduced to $300 million in a second trial that was limited to the amount of damages.
On appeal to the CAFC, Apple argued (relevant to this article) that the single infringement question on the verdict form covering all the asserted patents violated Apple’s right to jury unanimity. Put another way, the single-infringement-question verdict form permitted the jury to find Apple liable for infringement regardless of whether all jurors agreed that Apple was infringing
the same patent. Optis argued that the jury instructions—which explained,
e.g., that infringement is assessed on a claim-by-claim basis—remedied the problem with the verdict form.
The CAFC reversed, finding that the verdict form constituted an abuse of discretion. Specifically, the single-infringement-question deprived Apple of its right to a unanimous verdict on each legal claim as it related to infringement, under the Seventh Amendment and the Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 48.
The CAFC emphasized that “‘[e]ach patent asserted raises an independent and distinct cause of action,’ and therefore ‘infringement must be separately proved as to each patent.’” The CAFC further explained that each of the asserted patents defined a distinct cause of action with distinct asserted claims, not five alternative theories for a single common legal claim.
The CAFC was unpersuaded by Optis’ argument that the jury instructions remedied the problem with the verdict form, finding that the jurors could have correctly abided both the verdict form and jury instructions, and still could have entered a verdict predicated on the incorrect understanding of the infringement issue. In addition, the Court found Optis’ further contention that all the asserted claims were infringed because the (original) $506,200,000 award “‘corresponded
exactly to the sum of the five numbers that Optis’s damages expert gave as the measure of damages for each patent’” to be illogical as a “juror could have reasonably understood the verdict sheet and instructions as directing it to add up its damages valuations associated with each claim even a single juror found infringed.”
The CAFC therefore found that Optis was wrongly awarded damages for a scope of infringement that the jury had not unanimously found, reversing the $300 million damages award and remanding to the district court to retry this (and several other) issues.
