Settlement Does Not Justify Vacating Unfavorable Claim Construction Order

The court denied plaintiff's motion to vacate a claim construction order following settlement. "[Plaintiff] wants me to vacate the claim construction order, in which I adopted only one of its proposed constructions out of nine terms to be construed, because it is concerned about the potential collateral estoppel effects of my order in two actions pending before [another court]. . . . I am not going to relieve [plaintiff] from the consequences of its litigation strategy. It could have asked me to delay claim construction to wait for [the other court's] ruling. It is not lost on me that if I had ruled largely in [plaintiff's] favor, [it] would have trumpeted my rulings before [the other court]. Nor did [plaintiff] have to settle after I ruled. Further, I doubt that [the other court] needs me to erase history that [plaintiff] wishes did not exist in order to reach an appropriate determination in his cases. . . . [A] court should not chisel out parts of the public record and the body of law merely because an unsatisfied party wants to destroy the remains of its loss."

Flatworld Interactives LLC v. Apple Inc., 3-12-cv-01956 (CAND May 15, 2014, Order) (Orrick, J.)