Willis Electric Co., Ltd. v. Polygroup Ltd., Appeal No. 2024-2118 (Fed. Cir. Feb. 17, 2026)

In our Case of the Week, the Federal Circuit reviewed expert damages testimony en route to affirming a $42.5 million reasonable royalty award on appellant Polygroup’s infringing artificial Christmas trees.  The reviewing panel provided continued guidance on district courts’ gatekeeping function under Federal Rule of Evidence 702 as pertains to patent damages, following its 2025 en banc decision in EcoFactor, Inc. v. Google LLC, 137 F.4th 1333 (Fed. Cir. 2025) (our write-up here).

The case involved Willis Electric’s U.S. Patent No. 8,454,186, which is directed to pre-lit artificial trees with trunk sections that electrically connect to each other at any rotational orientation as they are assembled, as opposed to prior art trees that required manually making electrical connections after the initial assembly.  After a series of inter partes review challenges, the only claim remaining at trial was dependent claim 15, which depended from an independent claim 10 that had been found unpatentable as obvious by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board.  Certain issues on appeal involved questions of apportionment as between the features of claim 10—which recited making electrical connections during assembly independent of rotational orientation—and claim 15’s specific recital of using coaxial barrel connectors for this purpose.

The jury had found infringement and non-obviousness in the proceedings below, and on appeal, Polygroup challenged the district court’s denial of its JMOL motion of non-obviousness, and alternatively sought remand for a new trial on grounds that Willis’s expert damages testimony should have been excluded.  The Federal Circuit first found that substantial evidence supported the jury’s presumed determination that a person of ordinary skill in the art would not have been motivated to use coaxial connectors with the closest prior art trees, and affirmed the holding that claim 15 was not obvious.

On damages, Polygroup challenged the testimony of Willis’ expert, a Ms. Riley, who used income- and market-based apportionment techniques to arrive at a potential royalty range of $2-20, from which she selected a $5 per tree rate through qualitative adjustments based on application of the Georgia-Pacific factors.  The jury had presumably largely credited Ms. Riley’s testimony, with its $42.5 million verdict reflecting a royalty of about $4 per tree.

The Court first addressed the parties’ dispute as to how to account for the value of claim 15 in light of the fact that claim 10 had been held unpatentable in the IPR.  While Polygroup argued that damages should be apportioned down to reflect only the value of using coaxial connectors, Willis argued that claim 15 included all value “attributable to” coaxial barrel connectors, which included forming electrical connections during assembly regardless of rotational orientation.  The reviewing panel collected precedent to the effect that unpatented elements may be rendered more valuable by their use in combination with a patented invention—such that the value of all conventional elements need not necessarily be subtracted to assess damages—and found that substantial evidence supported the jury’s presumed finding that the value of coaxial connectors included the value of forming rotation-independent electrical connections.  The Court also noted that PTAB had used a “broadest reasonable interpretation” claim construction in invalidating claim 10; that “neither the Board nor the district court found claim 10 unpatentable under the district court’s [narrower] construction;” and that “[f]or at least this reason” the IPR determination did not preclude Ms. Riley’s reliance on that claim’s features in estimating the value attributable to coaxial connectors.

Polygroup also argued that Ms. Riley’s testimony should have been excluded “because she did not adequately explain her methodology to the jury.”  The Court rejected this argument, explaining that it conflated the admissibility question—which is based on all expert report material and other information before the judge—with the basis for the jury’s factual findings.  Here, Polygroup’s challenge was to the district court’s Rule 702 admissibility determination, and “[o]nce a district court has determined the expert’s methodology is reliable, challenged testimony does not become unreliable simply because a party believes an expert should have presented information to the jury differently.”

The panel rejected Polygroup’s remaining arguments in a fact-intensive review of Ms. Riley’s testimony, collecting precedent to the effect that assessing reasonable royalty damages “necessarily involves an element of approximation and uncertainty,” and finding on each point that Polygroup’s challenge went to the testimony’s credibility rather than admissibility.  This included challenges concerning Ms. Riley’s apportionment in view of claim 10’s invalidity; her accounting of other premium features in Willis products using the patented feature (which could also have driven higher profits for the infringing products); her reliance on Polygroup’s initial product quotes as a proxy for profitability where transaction-level final price data was unavailable; the import of a $2 per tree comparable license Willis entered into during the pendency of Polygroup’s IPR challenges; the comparability of other licenses relied on in her market-based analysis; and her application of upward and downward adjustments based on a qualitative assessment of the Georgia Pacific factors, of which the Court expressly approved.

Having affirmed the district court’s denial of JMOL of obviousness, its admitting Ms. Riley’s testimony, and its denial of a new trial on damages, the Court affirmed the jury’s damages verdict.

The full opinion can be found here.

By Jason A. Wrubleski

ALSO THIS WEEK

REGENXBIO Inc. v. Sarepta Therapeutics, Inc., Appeal No. 2024-1408 (Fed. Cir. Feb. 20, 2026)

In an appeal from a summary judgment decision finding claims invalid under 35 U.S.C. § 101, the Federal Circuit reversed.  At issue were claims in a patent titled “Method of Detecting and/or Identifying Adeno-Associated Virus (AAV) Sequences and Isolating Novel Sequences Identified Thereby.”  The claims are directed to genetically engineered host cells that contain adeno-associated virus rh.10 sequences.  In essence, a portion of a naturally-occurring virus is inserted into cultured cells.  The question presented was whether this invention was eligible for patenting, or was not eligible for patenting as a natural phenomenon.  The Court reviewed the history of cases relevant to the natural phenomenon exception to patentability, including Diamond v. Chakrabarty, 447 U.S. 303 (1980), Funk Bros. Seed Co. v. Kalo Inoculant Co., 333 U.S. 127 (1948), and Assn. for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics., Inc., 569 U.S. 576 (2013), and concluded that Regenxbio’s claims were more like those found admissible in Charkrabarty than the claims found ineligible in Funk Brothers and Myriad.

The full opinion can be found here.

By Nika Aldrich

Genuine Enabling Technology LLC v. Sony Group Corporation, Appeal No. 2024-1686 (Fed. Cir. Feb. 19, 2026)

In a case concerning game controllers for Sony’s Playstation 3 and 4 systems, the Federal Circuit affirmed summary judgment of non-infringement for Sony on appellant GET’s infringement claim seeking $500 million in damages.  GET appealed the District of Delaware’s decision that GET failed to show that claimed and accused structures in the controllers were equivalent for purposes of an “encoding means” limitation in GET’s U.S. Patent No. 6,219,730.

In a 2020 Markman order, the district court had construed the “encoding means” limitations of the ‘730 patent as means-plus-function limitations.   Infringement of such a limitation requires the accused structure to function in substantially the same way as the structure disclosed in the specification, and in affirming the lower court’s subsequent grant of summary judgment, the Federal Circuit agreed that GET failed to support its infringement analysis with any showing of the way in which the disclosed structure performs. The Court found that GET’s expert, a Dr. Fernald, ignored many of the elements contained in the relevant structure of the ‘730 patent (a certain “logic block 34”) and failed to explain why ignoring those elements was appropriate – in short, Dr. Fernald “was deficient in his explanation of why he had considerably curbed his analysis of logic block 34 to just one of its elements.” And where a patentee elects to focus its equivalence analysis on something less than the whole structure that is disclosed in the specification, the patentee has an obligation to meaningfully explain why it is permissible to discard the other elements. Dr. Fernald failed to do so, and the Court further noted that Dr. Fernald’s analysis of the relevant modules in the Accused Products was even more sparse than his analysis of logic block 34.

The Court found that a party cannot defeat summary judgment “with conclusory allegations, unsupported assertions, or only a scintilla of evidence.” GET’s truncated analysis of logic block 34 and of the relevant modules of the Accused Products thus fell short of showing structural equivalence between the claimed and accused patented structures.

The full opinion can be found here.

By Julia Davis

This article summarizes aspects of the law and does not constitute legal advice. For legal advice with regard to your situation, you should contact an attorney.