Defendant
1 case as defendant.
I'll research the company and the asserting plaintiff.
Company overview. Firstrade Securities Inc. is a privately held US online stockbrokerage and broker-dealer headquartered at 30-50 Whitestone Expressway, Flushing (Queens), New York. It was founded in 1985 by John Liu as First Flushing Securities and renamed Firstrade Securities Inc. in 1997, when it launched the Firstrade.com online trading platform. It is not publicly traded and no parent company is reported; it is a FINRA member and SIPC-protected broker-dealer. Third-party business-data aggregators (LeadIQ, Crunchbase/CB Insights) list headcount in the roughly 51–200 employee band, but the company does not publish audited revenue or employee figures, so those numbers are unverified.
Products / services. Firstrade is a self-directed retail brokerage. Its platform offers commission-free online trading in stocks, ETFs, options, mutual funds (11,000+ funds) and fixed income; it also provides retirement and cash-management accounts, margin trading, a proprietary trading platform with options analytics, and, more recently, access to cryptocurrencies. It serves domestic and international retail investors. Its most visible differentiator is a zero-commission pricing model.
Patent-litigation posture. Firstrade is an operating company and appears in the tracked data solely as a defendant — 0 plaintiff cases, 1 defendant case. That single suit, Cedar Lane Technologies Inc. v. Firstrade Securities Inc. (E.D.N.Y., filed 2025-11-13), fits the pattern of a non-practicing entity asserting patents against a technology-using end user. This is not a plaintiff-friendly Eastern District of Texas filing; the case sits in Firstrade's home district.
Asserting party and context. Cedar Lane Technologies Inc. is characterized as an NPE/PAE by Unified Patents and Stanford's NPE database. It is a Canadian entity incorporated in 2019 by attorney Greg Benoit; reporting ties much of its portfolio to patents acquired from Intellectual Ventures entities, spanning image processing, compression and remote-control technologies. Cedar Lane has filed hundreds of infringement suits, typically settling early rather than proceeding to trial. The specific patent or technology at issue in the Firstrade action is not identified in the tracked data.