An appeals court has upheld a $22.2 million jury verdict in a long-standing patent spat between Integer Holdings (NYSE:ITGR), formerly known as Greatbatch, and AVX, now part of Kyocera.
In a ruling released today, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals agreed with a lower court decision that AVX intentionally infringed certain Integer patents with its Ingenio filtered feedthrough assembly (FFT) devices. Integer originally filed a patent infringement complaint in April 2013, alleging that AVX infringed on patents related to the FFTs used in its implantable pacers and cardioverter defibrillators.
Integer was awarded $37.5 million in damages by the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware in January 2016. In that first trial, the jury upheld the validity of 2 asserted patents, and 2 additional patents that AVX had challenged. Three months later, AVX won a bid for reconsideration, which vacated a previous summary judgment in Integer’s favor and paved the way for another trial re-exploring whether AVX intentionally infringed on certain Integer patents with the Ingenio devices.
During the next trial, which took place in 2017, the jury was unable to reach a unanimous verdict as to whether the infringement from AVX’s Ingenio FFT devices was willful, according to court documents. In response to that decision, AVX filed a motion for a new trial to assess damages that took into account the new court verdicts, which were granted in March 2018, according to court documents.
In the retrial, the court awarded Integer approximately $22.2 million in damages, including approximately $10 million in damages for lost profits and sales related to infringement by AVX’s Frontier and Progeny devices, approximately $9.6 million for infringement by AVX’s Ingenio devices and approximately $2.5 million in damages for infringement by AVX’s NG3 devices, according to court documents.
The federal appeals court affirmed that decision today, but did not issue a formal opinion on it.
