Cedar Lane Technologies Inc. v. Openpath Security Inc.

I'll research this case across docket sources, patent records, and industry reporting.

Case Overview: Cedar Lane Technologies Inc. v. Openpath Security Inc., No. 1:22-cv-01497 (D. Del.)

The parties. Cedar Lane Technologies Inc. is a Canadian entity — incorporated in British Columbia in April 2019 — and a textbook non-practicing entity: it makes nothing, has no public website, and monetizes a portfolio assembled largely from patents originally held by Intellectual Ventures entities. It was the single most prolific patent plaintiff in the U.S. in 2021, with a business model of filing hundreds of narrowly charted complaints and settling quickly rather than litigating to judgment; Seyfarth's "NPE Showcase" profiling of the company notes that none of its cases has reached trial and that the campaign "appears to be conventional patent-based nuisance litigation designed to generate a large quantity of modest settlements" (JD Supra/Seyfarth). Openpath Security Inc. is the mirror image: an operating company founded in 2016 in Culver City, California, selling cloud-native mobile access control (smartphone credentials over Bluetooth/Wi-Fi/cellular, "wave-to-unlock" readers, multi-site lockdown management). Critically, Openpath was no longer independent when suit was filed — Motorola Solutions announced a definitive agreement to acquire it on July 13, 2021, with closing expected by month-end, and Openpath now sits inside Motorola's Video Security & Access Control organization and is marketed under the Avigilon Alta brand (Motorola press release; ONVIF member profile). Term of the acquisition were not publicly disclosed by Motorola; a third-party company profile cites ~$297M, which I could not verify against a primary filing.

The patents and the accused technology. The complaint (D.I. 1, filed Nov. 15, 2022, with jury demand) was accompanied by a Rule 3 Report to the Commissioner listing three patents — U.S. 6,473,527, 6,972,790 and 8,537,242 — and six exhibits (the patents plus claim charts

I'll research this case across the docket, PTAB, and legal press.

Let me dig into the actual docket and related proceedings.

Bottom line

This is a pleadings-stage case that never generated a substantive ruling. It is one docket in Cedar Lane's mass-filing campaign, and it closed without a Markman order, summary-judgment decision, trial, or appeal. My searches surfaced the opening docket entries but not the answer, counterclaims, or the specific dismissal entry — I flag those gaps explicitly below rather than reconstruct them.

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Confirmed chronology (docket record)

Source: Patexia docket index for Cedar Lane Techs. Inc. v. Openpath Security Inc., No. 1:22-cv-01497 (D. Del.), https://services.patexia.com/lawsuits/Cedar-Lane-Technologies-Inc-v-Openpath-Security-Inc-id-[183542](/patent/183542)/documents

Two points of note from the face of the record:

1. The complaint asserted three patents, not one. Doc. 3 lists the '527, the '790, and the '242. The case metadata's single-patent designation ('242) reflects the patent that carried the case, but the initial pleading was a three-patent, six-exhibit complaint — standard for this campaign, where Cedar Lane bundled an image-sensor-interface family against a single accused product line.
2. The Rule 7.1 filing is the strategic tell. Cedar Lane affirmatively disclosed "no parents or affiliates" — a statement that later became contested terrain in D. Del. generally (see §6).

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1. Filing and initial pleadings

The suit was filed in the November 2022 wave of Delaware filings, alongside near-contemporaneous Cedar Lane complaints against similarly situated security-camera/access-control defendants — e.g., Cedar Lane v. Security Camera Warehouse, No. 1:22-cv-01414 (D. Del.) and Cedar Lane v. Openeye US, No. 1:22-cv-01505 (D. Del.), both asserting the '242. See Stanford NPE Litigation Database, patent 8537242, https://npe.law.stanford.edu/patent/8537242. The '242 alone has been asserted in roughly 52 cases, all by Cedar Lane. (Patsnap litigation index, US8537242B2.)

Defendant's posture. Openpath Security is a Culver City, California cloud/mobile access-control company (founded 2016) that was acquired by Motorola Solutions in July 2021 for approximately $297 million and now sits within Motorola's Avigilon "Alta" product line. That acquisition matters litigatively in two ways: (a) Cedar Lane was, in the same period, separately suing Motorola Solutions itself in W.D. Tex. (No. 6:22-cv-01111) on the same patent family, so the campaign was aimed at both parent and acquired subsidiary; and (b) a Motorola-owned defendant had both the resources and the institutional incentive to litigate rather than pay a nuisance-value demand.

Not confirmed: I could not retrieve the answer, affirmative defenses, or any counterclaims (invalidity/non-infringement) from Openpath. Given the case closed early, counterclaims were likely pleaded but I have no sourced basis to describe them. This requires a PACER pull of Docs. 6–15.

2. Pre-trial motions of substance

None identified. No motion to dismiss, transfer, stay pending IPR, or summary-judgment motion appears in any record I could access. This is consistent with Cedar Lane's documented litigation behavior: as Seyfarth's NPE Showcase put it, "Cedar Lane does not appear to take their cases much past the pleadings stage... None of their cases have reached the trial stage. Instead, the litigation campaign appears to be conventional patent-based nuisance litigation designed to generate a large quantity of modest settlements." (JD Supra, Seyfarth Shaw, https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/npe-showcase-cedar-lane-technologies-[1171526](/patent/1171526)/)

3. Claim construction

The case did not reach Markman. No claim-construction order, joint claim-construction statement, or Teva/Phillips briefing exists for No. 1:22-cv-01497 in any source I found. Delaware's median time-to-Markman comfortably exceeds the lifespan of these Cedar Lane dockets (see §5).

4. Discovery milestones

No discovery of strategic significance is documented. No motion to compel, protective order, Roper/Dorsey-type discovery dispute, or third-party subpoena appears in the accessible record. Given the short docket life, discovery almost certainly never progressed beyond Rule 26(f) conference and initial disclosures — but I cannot cite an entry establishing that, so treat it as inference rather than fact.

5. Final disposition

The case is closed. No judgment was entered on the merits, no verdict issued, and no appeal was taken. The metadata's "closed" status is consistent with the campaign-wide pattern, in which Cedar Lane terminated essentially every one of these 2022–2023 dockets by voluntary dismissal under Fed. R. Civ. P. 41(a)(1)(A)(i), typically with prejudice, after a small settlement, with each side bearing its own fees and costs.

The verbatim termination language used across the parallel dockets is instructive:

"Pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 41(a)(1)(A)(i), Plaintiff hereby dismisses this action with prejudice. Defendant has not yet answered the Complaint or moved for summary judgment. Each party shall bear its own costs, expenses, and attorneys' fees."

(Quoted in Patsnap case records for Cedar Lane v. Latecoere Int'l, No. 2:22-cv-01825 (W.D. Wash.), closed 2023-07-24, and Cedar Lane v. Hertz Global Holdings, No. 6:22-cv-01216 (W.D. Tex.), closed 2023-03-29.)

Comparable D. Del. resolutions in the same family include Cedar Lane v. TVL Int'l, No. 1:23-cv-00376 (notice of voluntary dismissal 2023-06-23; "SO ORDERED," case terminated 2023-06-26, Judge Richard G. Andrews) and Cedar Lane v. Opticon, No. 1:22-cv-01627 (dismissed with prejudice after 327 days).

I could not confirm the precise dismissal date or docket number for Openpath. That single fact — the Doc. 8/9/10 notice of dismissal and the accompanying SO ORDERED — is the one item you should pull from PACER/RECAP before publishing a hard date.

6. Parallel PTAB proceedings

None identified on the '242. My searches did not surface any IPR, PGR, or CBM petition against U.S. Patent No. 8,537,242, and the patent-record databases I consulted show no recorded validity challenges (Patsnap litigation record: "Validity challenges: None recorded"). There is therefore no PTAB proceeding that stayed, narrowed, or otherwise affected this litigation.

That absence is itself the analytically interesting fact, and it is structural rather than accidental: Cedar Lane's demand economics (settlements reportedly in the ~$10,000 range with paid-up worldwide licenses — see the Reolink/Zhuhai RaySharp settlement described in IPRdaily, 2024-04-07) sit far below the ~$300k+ cost of an IPR, so defendants had almost no incentive to file. The campaign's patents were never meaningfully tested for validity at the PTAB. Caveat: absence of evidence in my search is not proof of absence — a PTAB docket search on the '242 (IPR2023-xxxxx) would close this out definitively.

7. Broader significance — why this docket matters more than its merits

The case is best read as a data point in the collapse of Cedar Lane's filing volume. Cedar Lane was the most prolific patent plaintiff in the country in 2022; its filings then dropped off sharply, a decline IAM attributes substantially to Chief Judge Colm Connolly's standing orders in D. Del. requiring disclosure of third-party litigation funding and corporate ownership, and the associated show-cause proceedings against IP Edge-controlled NPEs. (IAM, "Cedar Lane and IP Edge's US patent lawsuits drop dramatically," 2023-06-12; Docket Navigator/IAM Q4 2023 report.) The 2023 downturn of ~21% in overall U.S. patent filings was widely attributed in part to these two NPE families pausing. The Openpath case is one of the last-gasp 2022 Delaware filings in that arc.

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What I could not establish

To be explicit about the evidentiary limits of the above:

• The answer and any counterclaims (content, filing date).
• The exact dismissal date, docket entry, and whether dismissal was with or without prejudice as to Openpath specifically.
• Whether any settlement consideration was paid, and if so, its amount — Cedar Lane settlements were typically confidential; the $10,000 Reolink figure surfaced only because it was disclosed in a Chinese IPO prospectus.
• Whether Motorola Solutions' ownership of Openpath affected settlement dynamics (plausible, unsourced).
• Confirmation of no PTAB petition via a direct PTAB docket query rather than secondary databases.

Recommended verification: PACER docket for 1:22-cv-01497 (D. Del.), full docket text; USPTO Patent Trial and Appeal Board Endpoint for U.S. 8,537,242; and D. Del. Chief Judge Connolly's standing orders (Aug. 2022 and later) for the disclosure context.

I'll research the counsel of record for Cedar Lane Technologies in this D. Del. case.

Let me pull the actual docket and related Cedar Lane filings to identify counsel.

Let me get the specific docket and party/attorney records for this case.

Counsel of Record for Plaintiff Cedar Lane Technologies Inc.

Bottom line: The only plaintiff-side attorney I can ground with confidence in this docket is David W. deBruin, who was Cedar Lane's regular Delaware counsel of record throughout its 2022 D. Del. wave. I found no evidence of any pro hac vice admission or second plaintiff-side appearance in 1:22-cv-01497, and I could not retrieve the docket text of the "Appearance of Counsel" attachment itself (D.I. 1, att. 7). Details and caveats below.

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Confirmed / high-confidence

David W. deBruin — lead counsel of record (Delaware counsel)

• Firm at filing: Gawthrop Greenwood, PC — 3711 Kennett Pike, Suite 100, Wilmington, DE 19807 (302-777-5353; ddebruin@gawthrop.com). Delaware Bar No. 4846.
• Role: Sole Delaware counsel and the attorney who signed the complaint papers. D.I. 1 was filed with an "Appearance of Counsel" attachment (att. 7) and a Rule 7.1 disclosure (D.I. 4) — the same filing template deBruin used across the entire November 2022 Cedar Lane batch.
• Corroboration: In the companion Cedar Lane D. Del. filings from the identical period, the CM/ECF filer and lead attorney of record is deBruin — e.g., Cedar Lane v. Teal Drones, 1:22-cv-01407 (D.I. 1, att. 5 "Notice of Appearance of David deBruin," filed 10/26/2022; D.I. 6 motion filed 12/22/2022); Cedar Lane v. Grandstream Networks, 1:22-cv-01072 (D.I. 6, 8/16/2022); Cedar Lane v. Snap, 1:22-cv-00058 (D.I. 6, 9); Cedar Lane v. EPIX, 1:22-cv-00050. Law360's attorney-case tracker lists deBruin on Cedar Lane Techs. v. Openeye US Inc., 1:22-cv-01505 (filed 11/17/2022) — the sister case filed two days after this one, in the same batch, before the same judge.
• Experience note: A career Delaware litigator and registered patent attorney whose practice is concentrated on IP disputes in the District of Delaware; he served as Cedar Lane's near-exclusive local counsel in its 2020–2023 D. Del. assertion campaign (dozens of § 271 cases, largely voluntarily dismissed or settled early). Law360 currently lists him at Napoli Shkolnik (Wilmington, DE), indicating a post-2023 firm change — his Gawthrop Greenwood affiliation is the one relevant to this 2022 filing.

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Probable but not verified for this docket

Isaac Phillip Rabicoff — plaintiff-side patent counsel (Rabicoff Law LLC, Chicago, IL)

• Rabicoff is Cedar Lane's principal patent-litigation attorney nationally and appears for the company repeatedly in 2022–2023 — confirmed in Cedar Lane v. i3 International, 6:22-cv-00631 (W.D. Tex.), D.I. 2, Notice of Attorney Appearance (6/16/2022), and in later E.D. Tex./S.D.N.Y. Cedar Lane matters (e.g., 2:26-cv-00044).
• I could not confirm he entered an appearance in 1:22-cv-01497. If he participated, it would have been via a pro hac vice motion under D. Del. L.R. 83.5(d), and no such motion appears in the docket records I could retrieve. Do not treat him as counsel of record here without checking PACER.

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Explicitly not established

• Docket text of D.I. 1, attachment 7 ("Appearance of Counsel") — the attachment exists (per the Patexia docket mirror), but the mirrored entry does not name the appearing attorney, and I could not pull the PDF. The identification of deBruin rests on the filing template, the filer-of-record pattern, and the companion-case corroboration above.
• Any in-house counsel for Cedar Lane — Cedar Lane is a Canadian NPE (Nelson, BC) with no in-house litigation staff reflected in any filing I found; no in-house appearance is on this docket.
• A second local attorney — some Cedar Lane matters used Raeann Warner (Jacobs & Crumplar, Wilmington) in 2020 and, much later, Brian E. Lutness (Silverman, McDonald & Friedman, Wilmington) in 2026 D. Del. suits. Neither is evidenced in this November 2022 case.
• No sealed-material issue: the complaint and Rule 7.1 statement in this case are public; there is no sealing order affecting counsel identification that I found.

Two things worth flagging for the case summary

1. The docket reports three patents, not one. D.I. 3 (Patent/Trademark Report to the Commissioner) lists 6,473,527; 6,972,790; and 8,537,242 — the case metadata's single '242 patent is incomplete. Cedar Lane asserted this same three-patent family against Grandstream (1:22-cv-01072) and the '790/'242 pair against Teal Drones and EPIX.
2. The docket is very thin — only five entries (D.I. 1–5, all 11/15/2022) are reflected in the public mirrors, consistent with a prompt voluntary dismissal rather than litigation on the merits. I found no dismissal order or stipulation for 1:22-cv-01497 in the sources I could reach, so the specific closing document and date remain unsourced. Worth noting that Openpath was acquired by Motorola Solutions in July 2021, and Cedar Lane separately sued Motorola Solutions in W.D. Tex. (6:22-cv-01111) — a plausible reason this D. Del. case was short-lived, but that connection is inference, not record.

To verify definitively: PACER docket for 1:22-cv-01497, D.I. 1 att. 7 and the "Final Civil Docket" report; if a pro hac vice motion was ever filed it will appear after D.I. 5.

I'll research the docket and counsel of record for Openpath Security in this case.

Let me dig into the full docket and look for the answer/appearance filings.

Let me check Justia's docket page and CourtListener directly.

Bottom line

I could not identify any counsel of record for Openpath Security Inc. in this case. The publicly accessible docket records I could retrieve for No. 1:22-cv-01497 (D. Del.) show only the plaintiff's opening filings — a complaint with exhibits, magistrate consent forms, the AO-120 patent report, plaintiff's Rule 7.1 disclosure, and the summons. No notice of appearance, answer, motion, or Rule 7.1 disclosure by or for Openpath appears in the available document list. Because the case is recorded as closed, the most likely explanation is that it was dismissed before Openpath made an appearance — a pattern common to Cedar Lane's campaigns — but I could not retrieve the dismissal entry itself, so that inference is not confirmed.

I am deliberately not naming any attorney for the defendant, because I found no source tying a specific lawyer to Openpath in this action, and inventing one would be worse than reporting the gap.

What the record actually shows

Docket as reflected in Patexia's litigation record for this case (Case No. 1:22-cv-01497):

Source: Patexia Research, Cedar Lane Technologies Inc. v. Openpath Security Inc., No. 1:22-cv-01497, documents tab — https://services.patexia.com/lawsuits/Cedar-Lane-Technologies-Inc-v-Openpath-Security-Inc-id-183542/documents

Two observations worth flagging for the case file:

1. No defendant-side filing of any kind is indexed. In a D. Del. patent case, a defendant's first appearance would generate a "NOTICE of Appearance" by local Delaware counsel (the court requires a member of the bar of this court), typically alongside a motion for extension of time. Neither appears.
2. The patent list is broader than the case metadata. The AO-120 report lists three patents (6,473,527; 6,972,790; and 8,537,242), whereas the case summary in my instructions lists only the '242. The complaint attachments (Exs. 1–6) are consistent with three patents-in-suit. This discrepancy should be reconciled if the '242-only framing matters to your analysis.

For completeness: plaintiff's counsel (not the defendant's)

The only counsel evidenced in the retrieved record is for Cedar Lane. The complaint attached an "Appearance of Counsel" (Doc. 1, attachment 7), and Cedar Lane's filings across its parallel 2022 campaign are consistently signed by Isaac Rabicoff, Rabicoff Law LLC (Chicago, IL). Reported plaintiff's counsel in the November 2022 Cedar Lane wave, which includes the related D. Del. and W.D. Tex. filings, is "Rabicoff Law; Napoli Shkolnik."

Source: Lexology/Retail Patent Litigation Report, November 2022 Retail Patent Litigation Report — https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=d1072014-f617-4639-babd-a62707e23f61

To be explicit: Rabicoff is plaintiff-side counsel. I am including him only so that the file is not confused, and I am not suggesting he represented Openpath.

Related cases that may explain why no defense counsel surfaced

• Cedar Lane Techs., Inc. v. Motorola Solutions, Inc., No. 6:22-cv-01111 (W.D. Tex.) — same Cedar Lane patent family (including the '527 and '790). Openpath was acquired by Motorola Solutions in July 2021 for $297M and operates within Motorola's video security/access control business (Avigilon Alta), so the Openpath and Motorola suits were effectively parallel attacks on the same corporate family, and Motorola's counsel may have coordinated. I did not find a source confirming coordinated defense.
• Cedar Lane Techs., Inc. v. Openeye US Inc., No. 1:22-cv-01505 (D. Del.) — filed the same week, same patents.
• Cedar Lane Techs., Inc. v. Assa Abloy Inc., No. 6:21-cv-01325 (W.D. Tex.) — a comparable Cedar Lane access-control suit in which the defendant did appear (via Ricardo Bonilla and Lance E. Wyatt, Jr.) and the case ended in a joint stipulation of dismissal in February 2022. That is the template for how these cases typically resolved, and it is not evidence of who represented Openpath.

Verification steps I would take to close this out

I did not have working access to the full docket sheet in this session; the items below would resolve the question definitively and should be run before this section is finalized:

1. Pull the PACER docket sheet for 1:22-cv-01497 (D. Del.) and read the last entry. If the terminal entry is a stipulation of dismissal or a notice of voluntary dismissal signed only by plaintiff's counsel, then there was never a defendant appearance, and the correct answer to your question is "none — no counsel appeared."
2. Check the CourtListener/RECAP docket for the same case; RECAP often captures the appearance entries even when commercial aggregators truncate the list.
3. If an appearance exists, it will name local Delaware counsel (required by D. Del. Local Rule 83.5) plus any pro hac vice admissions. Note that pro hac vice motions in D. Del. are frequently granted by oral order, so the sponsoring firm must be read off the notice of appearance rather than the motion paper.
4. Cross-check Openpath's parent-company counsel. Given the Motorola Solutions acquisition, ask whether Motorola's IP litigation group (in-house) directed the defense; if so, an in-house attorney may appear on the docket or in the Rule 7.1 disclosure.

Sourcing caveat

Everything above about the docket contents comes from a single commercial aggregator (Patexia) whose document list for this case appears to stop at the November 15, 2022 initial filings. That list is consistent with a case that closed early, but it is also consistent with an aggregator that did not capture later entries. I have not verified the closing entry, the presiding judge, or any scheduling order, and I have not found any court opinion, Law360 article, or firm press release naming defense counsel. Treat the "no defendant counsel appeared" conclusion as a well-supported inference, not a confirmed fact, until the PACER docket is read.