Arendi sued LG alleging that various LG products infringed U.S. Patent No. 7,917,843. The local discovery rules required Arendi to specifically identify the accused products and the asserted patent(s) they allegedly infringe with a claim chart relating each accused product to the asserted claims each product allegedly infringes. Although Arendi filed a Disclosure that listed hundreds of LG products as infringing four claims of the ’843 patent, it provided “exemplary” claim charts for only one of those products (LG’s Rebel 4 phone). LG advised Arendi a number of times that the singular-product claim charts for the ’843 patent were insufficient, but Arendi did not supplement its Disclosure. After the close of fact discovery, Arendi provided its expert report and LG moved to strike portions of that report because it disclosed, for the first time, infringement contentions for non-Rebel 4 products. The district court granted that motion, and yet Arendi still took no action to supplement its Disclosure. Instead, Arendi filed a second complaint that also asserted that LG’s non-Rebel 4 products infringed the ’843 patent. LG moved to dismiss the second complaint as duplicative since all of the non-Rebel 4 products accused in the new lawsuit were also accused in the original lawsuit. The district court granted that motion and Arendi appealed. Arendi challenges the district court’s determination that the two lawsuits involve the same subject matter, because when the district court granted of LG’s motion to strike parts of Arendi’s expert report, the non-Rebel 4 products were effectively not at issue in the first case. However, the CAFC notes that the district court did not grant LG’s motion to strike parts of Arendi’s infringement expert report because Arendi failed to sufficiently accuse the non-Rebel 4 products, but rather because Arendi failed to fulfill its discovery obligations with respect to those products. The CAFC further observes that Arendi’s argument that the non-Rebel 4 products are “materially different” than the Rebel 4 says nothing about the overlap between the non-Rebel 4 products accused in the first lawsuit and the non-Rebel 4 products accused in the second suit. Left with the simple and obvious fact that the non-Rebel 4 products accused in the second lawsuit are identical to products accused in the first lawsuit, the CAFC concludes that the district court did not err in dismissing the second complaint as improperly duplicative, and therefore affirms the district court’s dismissal of the complaint.
