Monty Cristo,
From your prior post:
In any case, this Markman hearing was very important because the issues of law are adjudicated and it basically encourages settlement, particularly in Judge Andrews' court room. If you read about Andrews (who is set to try the case if you haven't been paying attention), it appears he has the fewest patent-specific procedures and guidelines out of all four Article III judges that sit on the Delaware court. He apparently has a unique procedure for these Markman hearings. I read that "instead of having the parties file separate claim construction charts and briefs for the Markman hearing, he requires the parties to exchange their proposed claim terms for construction, exchange their proposed constructions, confer, and file a Joint Claim Construction Chart, as well as a Joint Claim Construction Brief." In other words, he gets the parties to sit down and really pinpoint what the contentious issues are. This leads to less strong-arming and taking a tunnel-vision approach with one's own case. This makes the aspect of settlement more conducive, particularly as Andrews found in favor of ChanBond after the December 9th Markman hearing
Would this mean that each of the Cisco 13 need to sit down together and determine, not only an amount to be used for settlement but, what each company believes is its fair share of that settlement to be?
If that is the case, would you believe they have previously determined that split?
In my mind, just this one piece might take years of in-fighting between the Cisco 13 to determine. Would the judge take that scenario into consideration as to why the trial date would need to be pushed back?
I can't imagine the time and effort the companies would spend to just determine who is responsible for how much of the settlement would be attributed to its company.
