Defendant
2 cases as defendant.
Erie Indemnity Company ("Indemnity," trading as part of the Erie Insurance Group, or "The ERIE") is a publicly held Pennsylvania corporation headquartered at 100 Erie Insurance Place, Erie, Pennsylvania. It was incorporated in 1925 alongside the Erie Insurance Exchange and went public on NASDAQ (ticker: ERIE) on October 2, 1995, with Class A and Class B shares. Per its 2024 Form 10-K, it reported approximately 6,715 full-time employees and total revenue of about $3.8 billion; market capitalization has recently run in the high-teens billions of dollars (third-party financial data).
Indemnity is a management company, not an underwriter. It serves as attorney-in-fact for the policyholders (subscribers) of the Erie Insurance Exchange, a Pennsylvania reciprocal insurer, and is the sole service provider to the Exchange and its wholly owned subsidiaries (Erie Insurance Company, Erie Insurance Company of New York, Erie Insurance Property & Casualty Company, Flagship City Insurance Company, and Erie Family Life Insurance Company). Its single reportable segment is management operations: policy issuance and renewal services (agent compensation, underwriting and policy processing, customer service, IT) and administrative services (claims handling, life insurance management, investment management). Compensation comes from a management fee of up to 25% of the Exchange's direct and affiliated assumed premiums, plus at-cost reimbursements. The Exchange's book is roughly 71% personal lines (private passenger auto, homeowners) and 29% commercial lines (commercial multi-peril, commercial auto, workers' compensation), distributed through independent agents in 12 states and the District of Columbia.
Litigation posture: an operating company defending against NPE suits. The case data shows 0 plaintiff-side and 2 defendant-side appearances. It has never been a patent plaintiff in the tracked record.
Notable cases: Both tracked matters arise from Intellectual Ventures I LLC v. Erie Indemnity Company, filed August 21, 2014 in the Western District of Pennsylvania — Erie's home venue, not a plaintiff-friendly district such as the Eastern District of Texas. Intellectual Ventures, a well-known patent assertion entity, asserted U.S. Patent Nos. 6,519,581; 6,510,434; 6,546,002; and 7,757,298 against Erie and affiliated Exchange entities, alongside parallel suits against Highmark and Old Republic. The district court dismissed the claims under 35 U.S.C. § 101 in September 2015, and the Federal Circuit largely affirmed in 2017 (Intellectual Ventures I LLC v. Erie Indemnity Co., 711 F. App'x 1012).
Patent infringement action in which the '298 patent was asserted against the Erie Defendants. The district court held the '298 claims patent-ineligible under 35 U.S.C. § 101 and granted Erie's Rule 12(b)(6) motion; the Federal Circuit affirmed in Appeal No. 2017-1147.
Federal Circuit appeal from the W.D. Pa. decision holding the '298 patent claims ineligible under 35 U.S.C. § 101. The court affirmed in a nonprecedential opinion decided November 1, 2017.