@Bsav,
Is the fact that the parties are the same the over-riding criteria?
That wouldn't seem to make sense if the patents at issue are distinctly different. The cases I have come across where cross-suits were merged were mostly when each party is claiming infringement over the SAME patent or patent family (i.e. each side claims ownership via different patents and claims the other's patent is invalid).
As you research, it would seem that any useful precedents would be cases that involved the same parties counter-suing each other for cross-infringement, and seeing how those cross suits were handled.
For example, was it common for those suits to be merged as you suggested?
I guess merging unrelated suits involving unrelated patents just doesn't make sense to me simply because the parties are the same. If so, we wouldn't be seeing thousands of existing suits still in play now between giants like AAPL, GOOG, NOK, Samsung, MSFT, etc since they are always suing each other -- we would see them all consolidated down to a small handful of suits wouldn't we?
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