"We disagree with the district court’s reading of Sixth Circuit precedent. Though the Sixth Circuit did uphold damages awards that were calculated using royalties-based damages models in Vitro Corp. and Mid-Michigan, it did not preclude the plaintiff from seeking unjust enrichment damages altogether . . . The district court’s preclusion of unjust enrichment damages impacted Versata’s ability to seek damages throughout this case, including at trial and during posttrial proceedings. Accordingly, we partially vacate the district court’s JMOL zeroing out the jury’s damages award and remand for a new trial on damages for trade secret misappropriation."

"We therefore conclude that the district court erred when it determined that Versata did not present any evidence that would allow the jury to calculate damages with reasonable certainty. Versata’s and Ford’s expert testimony, the submission of the MSSA and the 2011 addendum, and the jury instructions given by Versata’s counsel during closing arguments all amount to sufficient evidence that provided the jury with a discernible path to properly calculate damages. Accordingly, we reverse the district court’s reduction of breach of contract damages and reinstate the jury award of $82,260,000 to Versata."

"[W]e find no clear error in the district court’s analysis of the skilled artisan’s motivation to modify the reduction step of Kondo specifically. As the district court noted, both experts agreed that many of the steps of Kondo would have been considered for modification, including the reduction step . . . And Dr. Dichtel presented significant testimony about why a skilled artisan would have sought to modify Kondo’s reduction step, including cost savings, improvement of the reaction’s safety profile, post-processing simplification, and knowledge that the hydrogenating agent was already being used in molar excess . . . This evidence, tethered to the chemical realities of the reaction, is a far cry from the conclusory expert testimony our case law rejects . . . We therefore decline to find clear error in the district court’s choice to credit this testimony."

"The distinction . . . matters: constitutional standing “is a jurisdictional requirement” that is “incurable if absent at the initiation of suit,” whereas a statutory standing defect is “curable by joinder” . . . Accordingly, a plaintiff may have constitutional standing without satisfying the additional statutory requirement of possessing “all substantial rights” . . . In attempting to reconcile our precedents, some district courts have drawn a bright line between our cases addressing constitutional standing and those addressing statutory standing, concluding that cases addressing one side of that line have little, if any, relevance to cases on the other side . . . although the two standing inquiries are distinct, the same facts bearing on whether a patent owner has granted “all substantial rights” to a licensee to enable the licensee to have statutory standing may also bear on whether the owner retained “an exclusionary right” sufficient for constitutional standing."

"In this case, Plaintiff retains a sublicensing veto that (while it must be reasonably exercised) prevents Ingevity from granting sublicenses absent Plaintiff’s consent or free of Plaintiff’s royalty interest . . . That consent right over sublicensing helps preserve Plaintiff’s exclusionary interest because it prevents the licensee from unilaterally authorizing an accused infringer’s practice of the patents without Plaintiff’s approval and royalty interests. Moreover, “infringement would amount to an invasion of [Plaintiff’s] legally protected interest” in the patents because it deprives it of royalties to which it is entitled as a patent owner . . . Plaintiff’s right to sue, right to veto sublicenses, and royalty interests confirm that Plaintiff retains an exclusionary right, establishing that Plaintiff retains a concrete stake in excluding unauthorized practice of the patents and a mechanism to enforce that interest . . . On these facts, Plaintiff retained an exclusionary right sufficient for Article III standing, namely the non-illusory right to sue that their licensee, Ingevity, could not nullify through unilateral, royalty-free sublicensing." (emphasis added)

" . . . that the asserted claims were invalid under § 101 because they claimed patent-ineligible subject matter . . . Separately, City National argued that the claims were invalid under § 103, because they were “not patentably distinct” from the claims determined to be unpatentable in the IPR, so were “also obvious . . . in view of the[ ] same [prior art] references.”"

"City National advanced the same principal reasons for both the § 285 award and the § 1927 sanction: (a) “a cursory look” at the asserted claims showed them to be invalid, J.A. 552; (b) mCom had not adequately pleaded infringement, J.A. 555; (c) “mCom [never] investigate[d] whether a license . . . would cover the purported infringing activity,” “even after being put on actual notice” of such a license, J.A. 552, 554; and (d) mCom had filed many other patent suits without taking any to trial, implying an improper goal of “quickly settling . . . for nuisance value."

"[B]ecause in district court a fact-dependent obviousness challenge faces a higher burden of persuasion than in an IPR, mCom could reasonably have believed that an invalidity analysis in district court could not simply take the IPR result for different claims as a starting point (based on issue preclusion) and address only patentable distinctness . . . . The district court also observed that mCom had filed a first complaint that was struck for a nonsubstantive reason (shotgun pleading, i.e., insufficient separation of the claims of direct and indirect infringement) and a second complaint that was dismissed . . . But this two-pronged reason does not go to the relevant question whether the case was exceptionally substantively weak or unreasonably litigated. The first aspect is purely formal; the second is nothing more than lack of merit, which, as indicated, is not legally sufficient for § 285 purposes."