Defendant
1 case as defendant.
I'll research Clearfield, Inc. to verify its profile and the litigation context.
Clearfield, Inc. (NASDAQ: CLFD) is a Minneapolis, Minnesota–based fiber connectivity company, incorporated in 1979 and formerly known as APA Enterprises, Inc. until its January 2008 renaming. It is an independent, publicly traded operating company (not a subsidiary), with about 243 full-time employees per Yahoo Finance and headcount in the low hundreds. Fiscal 2026 revenue guidance is $160–170 million, per its May 2026 earnings release; shares trade on Nasdaq under CLFD.
Products / operations. Clearfield designs, manufactures, and distributes fiber optic management, protection, and delivery products for communications networks, marketing a "fiber to anywhere" platform. Major product lines include FieldSmart (panels, cabinets, wall boxes, enclosures), WaveSmart (optical components for coupling, splitting, termination, multiplexing, demultiplexing), FiberFlex (outdoor active cabinets), FieldShield (fiber pathway/protection and deployment reel), CraftSmart FiberFirst pedestals, YOURx access terminals, Fiber Assemblies, and the ClearPass connector cleaning dust cap. Customers are community broadband providers, MSOs/cable operators, incumbent and competitive carriers, ISPs, utilities, municipalities, cooperatives, data centers, and military markets, served through a direct sales force and authorized distributors. It reports more than a million fiber ports deployed annually.
Patent-litigation posture. The company is an operating company defending against a competitor's patent suit — not an NPE or a two-way litigant. The tracked data show 1 case, 0 as plaintiff and 1 as defendant, consistent with a product company being attacked. There is no indication of Eastern District of Texas activity; the tracked dispute was filed in the District of Minnesota.
Notable case. The sole tracked matter, CommScope v. Clearfield, Inc. (CommScope Technologies LLC v. Clearfield, Inc., No. 0:17-cv-00307, D. Minn.), was filed in January 2017. CommScope asserted 13 FTTx-related patents against Clearfield's FieldSmart PON Cabinets, WaveSmart Ruggedized Splitters, FieldShield Deployment Reel System, SmartRoute Panel, FieldShield Multiport SmarTerminal, and FieldShield Hardened Connectors. Clearfield filed affirmative defenses and inter partes reviews at the USPTO. The parties settled in 2018, jointly dismissing the litigation and withdrawing the IPRs; Clearfield paid $850,000 and moved to redesigned products.
Real district-court case referenced in invalidity-chart responses between CommScope and Clearfield, Inc. concerning the internal-cable-spool patent family that includes US 8,189,984. The narrative could not confirm the docket number, jurisdiction, filing date, status, or whether the '984 patent itself was named.