Karl Storz V. Sryker: District Court Strikes Infringement Expert Who Provided No Analysis Of Infringement

In this patent infringement action, Stryker moved to strike the expert report of Karl Storz' ("KSEA") infringement expert because the expert did not provide any analysis of infringement of the patent-in-suit. As explained by the district court, Karl Storz' infringement expert's, Mr. Gould Bear, report included six sections: (1) introduction, (2) summary of conclusions, (3) background and qualifications, (4) materials reviewed, (5) legal principals and methods, and (6) conclusion.

The expert report did not provide any analysis regarding how "the accused products literally include each element of Claims 1, 2 and 3 of the '420 Patent." And the district court explained that "[e]ven Mr. Gould Bear's description of his process is conclusory: 'I have analyzed literal infringement with respect to each limitation of the asserted patent claim, comparing the accused products - in their ordinary and intended uses - to the invention described in the patent claim they are alleged to infringe. When analyzing a dependent claim, I determined whether the allegedly infringing products include each and every element of the dependent claim, the independent claim from which it depends and all intermediate dependent claims.' (Id. at 14-15 ¶ 32.)

The expert report made no effort to explain how the expert determined that the allegedly infringing products include each element of the dependent claim and instead just stated he had made that determination.

In response, Karl Storz argued that Mr. Gould Bear "considered dozens of public and confidential documents regarding the accused Stryker product and KSEA's patented user interface" as well as KSEA's infringement contentions and the documents Stryker identified as providing the most accurate description of its product. The district court disagreed that this was sufficient. "[T]he review of certain documents does not meet the requirement under Rule 26 to describe the 'reasons and basis' for his expert opinion."

Karl Storz also argued that Mr. Gould Bear "compared the accused products with the claim that KSEA asserts is infringed, as a person of skill in the art at the time of the invention would understand the meaning of the patent claims" by following a set of rules outlined in his report. The district court also...