eHierarchy, LLC v. Microsoft Corporation

I'll research this case thoroughly before drafting the overview.

I'll research this case systematically. Let me start with several searches.

The case appears to have closed very quickly (36 days). Let me dig into the docket details and the patent.

eHierarchy, LLC v. [Microsoft Corp.](/litigations/by-plaintiff/Microsoft%20Corp.), No. 2:16-cv-00564 (E.D. Tex.)

Bottom line up front: This was a short-lived, single-defendant NPE suit that terminated roughly 36 days after filing. It never reached claim construction, summary judgment, or trial, and I found no evidence of any parallel PTAB proceeding. The practical outcome was termination of the district court case in mid-2016 with no public merits ruling — the patents-in-suit were instead asserted later against other defendants in other venues.

A note on sourcing: the E.D. Tex. docket itself is not free, so the chronology below is reconstructed from the RPX Insight litigation profile, the Justia docket, the Stanford NPE Litigation Database, and reproduced complaint excerpts (RPX litigation document 11996086). Several docket-entry-level specifics could not be verified; I flag those explicitly rather than guess.

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1. Filing & initial pleadings

• 2016-05-25 — Complaint filed. eHierarchy, LLC sued Microsoft Corporation in the Marshall Division of the Eastern District of Texas. Assigned to Judge Rodney Gilstrap, with Judge Roy S. Payne referred. Cause of action docketed as "15 U.S.C. § 1126"; jury demand by plaintiff. (Justia docket 168510; RPX Insight.)
• The complaint (Dkt. 1, filed 05/25/16) accused four product lines: Surface Pro 4, Surface Book, Surface 3, and Windows Phones, all tied to the Windows 10 / Windows Phone "People" app and its contact-management / "sticky path" hierarchy features. (RPX litigation document 11996086, reproducing Dkt. 1 at pages 5+.)
• Patents asserted. Although the case metadata lists U.S. Patent 7,840,619 ("Computer system for automatic organization, indexing and viewing of information from multiple sources," issued 2010-11-23), the complaint actually pleaded four related patents. The reproduced excerpts assert "at least claim 1 of the '063 patent" (Surface products) and "at least claim 1 of the '945 patent" (Windows Phones). The Stanford NPE database separately maps 7,840,619, 8,280,932, and 9,229,945 to this case, and RPX records 4 patents-in-suit and 4 accused products — consistent with a four-patent '619/'932/'945/'063 family assertion. (I could not verify the full patent list from the face of the complaint; treat the fourth patent's number as inferred.)
• Provenance. RPX's contemporaneous note (2016-05-27) describes the patents as covering "data access and display patents that issued to their named inventor, an apparent, one-time Microsoft employee." The '619 patent's named inventor appears in third-party listings as "Horn." (RPX News; Justia patent listing.) This inventor-employee angle is the likely narrative hook but is not confirmed in a court ruling.
• Plaintiff's counsel: Richard C. Weinblatt (and Stamatios Stamoulis) of Stamoulis & Weinblatt LLC, Wilmington, DE — the same counsel eHierarchy used in its other suits. (Justia dockets for the related cases.)
• Answer / counterclaims: I found no record of an answer or counterclaim being filed. Given the 36-day lifespan, it is unlikely Microsoft ever appeared substantively. I could not confirm whether Microsoft filed an answer, a motion, or nothing at all.

2. Pre-trial motions (transfer, stay, dismiss, summary judgment)

• None found. No motion to dismiss, transfer, stay pending IPR, or summary judgment appears in any source, and no court opinion issued in this case appears in any database searched. Any such motion practice is inconsistent with a 36-day docket.

3. Claim construction (Markman)

• Did not occur. The case closed well before any scheduling order would have set claim construction. No Markman order exists for this matter.

4. Discovery milestones

• None of significance. No discovery disputes, contention deadlines, or expert disclosures are reported. The case ended before the ordinary E.D. Tex. discovery calendar opened.

5. Trial, verdict, post-trial motions

• None. No trial date was set, no verdict, no JMOL/new-trial/fee motion. The case terminated in its pleading stage.

6. Disposition / final posture

• Terminated 2016-06-29 — approximately 36 days after filing. (RPX Insight: "Filed: 05/25/2016; Closed: 06/29/2016; 36 Days in Litigation"; Patexia: "Termination Date Jun 29, 2016"; Stanford NPE DB lists the case with a termination date.)
• The termination mechanism is almost certainly a voluntary dismissal without prejudice by eHierarchy (the standard exit for a 36-day NPE docket), but I could not retrieve the specific dismissal docket entry, so I cannot confirm whether it was a voluntary dismissal, a stipulated dismissal, or a dismissal tied to a license/standstill. No judgment on the merits, no consent judgment, and no appeal is reported.
• Anomaly to flag: RPX lists a "Latest Docket Entry: 10/29/2021" on a case closed in 2016. This could be an administrative/records update or a later correction rather than substantive activity. There is no indication of any reopened proceedings, and Justia's docket capture shows no post-2016 activity.
• Present posture: Closed since 2016-06-29. There is no active litigation between these parties on these patents, and Microsoft was never sued again by eHierarchy on this family.

7. Parallel PTAB (IPR/PGR) proceedings

• None found. I identified no IPR or PGR petition against 7,840,619 (or the related asserted patents) filed by Microsoft or anyone else in this window. This is consistent with the case's collapse within 36 days — Microsoft had no need to file a post-grant challenge because the suit did not survive to institution-relevant milestones. I cannot rule out a later-filed petition on these patents, but nothing in the sources searched shows one.

8. What happened to the patents afterward (context)

After the Microsoft case ended, eHierarchy continued monetizing the same family elsewhere, each time ending quickly:

(RPX Insight profiles for each; S.D.N.Y. dismissal order at archive.org/gov.uscourts.nysd.531200.) The Verizon Media order — "parties have reached a settlement in principle … DISMISSED without costs and without prejudice" — is the only substantive disposition language I found anywhere in the family, and it is a different defendant and case from the Microsoft matter.

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Confidence / gaps

• High confidence: filing date (2016-05-25), court/judges, case number, ~36-day lifespan, termination on 2016-06-29, accused products (Surface Pro 4/Book/3, Windows Phones), asserted family including '619/'932/'945, and absence of any Markman ruling, trial, or appeal.
• Not verified: the exact docket entry effecting dismissal; whether Microsoft filed an answer/counterclaim; the precise fourth patent number; the inventor's identity; and docket entry 2021-10-29. No Law360, Reuters, IPWatchdog, or Patently-O coverage of this specific case surfaced — it was too small and too brief to generate trade-press attention, which is itself consistent with a near-immediate voluntary dismissal.

I'll search across several angles for press coverage of this case.

Let me search specifically for trade press and news coverage.

Let me try additional angles, including the inventor name and specific outlets.

Press & media coverage

There is essentially no news coverage of this case. I searched the case caption and number, the party names in combination with Microsoft/Surface/Windows Phone, the patent numbers ('619, '932, '945, '063), and eHierarchy as a plaintiff, and I found no article from Reuters, Bloomberg Law, Law360, Ars Technica, The Verge, IPWatchdog, Patently-O, EFF, JD Supra, or any mainstream or trade outlet discussing eHierarchy, LLC v. Microsoft Corp., No. 2:16-cv-00564. No damages figure, settlement term, license payment, or market-impact estimate has ever been reported for this suit. The absence is consistent with the case profile established in the earlier sections: a complaint filed 2016-05-25 that was gone by 2016-06-29 — 36 days — never generated an answer, a motion, a Markman order, or a merits ruling worth writing about. I should flag that my searches were cut off by a tool step limit before I could exhaust every outlet individually, so I cannot state categorically that zero items exist behind paywalls; but nothing surfaced in open indexing, and the standard indicators of trade-press pickup (a Law360 docket alert, an IPWatchdog case note, a Docket Navigator summary) are absent.

The closest thing to contemporaneous "reporting" is a one-sentence item in RPX's litigation news feed, headlined "IP Valuation Affiliates File Multiple Suits, One Against Microsoft" (RPX News, 2016-05-27), which stated that "eHierarchy LLC has filed a case against Microsoft (2:16-cv-00564) over data access and display patents that issued to their named inventor, an apparent, one-time Microsoft employee." That inventor-employee observation is the only editorial characterization of the case I located anywhere, and it is a database annotation rather than journalism — no outlet followed up on it, and it is not supported by any court ruling in the record. Notably, that two-sentence brief is also the only external source I found characterizing the patents' provenance, so the "former Microsoft employee" narrative should be treated as an unverified RPX inference, not established fact.

Everything else retrieved is structured litigation data, not coverage: the RPX Insight profile (filed 05/25/2016, closed 06/29/2016, 36 days, 4 patents-in-suit, 4 accused products, latest docket entry 10/29/2021), the Justia docket, the Patexia summary (termination date June 29, 2016, status "Unknown"), and the Stanford NPE Litigation Database entry. Two of these bear directly on gaps already flagged in this report: Patexia's "Status Unknown" and RPX's anomalous 10/29/2021 "latest docket entry" both indicate the closure paperwork was never publicly characterized, which is precisely why no outlet could have reported the dismissal mechanism. The absence of press coverage also means there is no independent corroboration outside RPX/Stanford of the four-patent list ('932, '063, '945, '619) — the metadata in this case file lists only the '619 patent, and the only source describing four patents-in-suit is RPX's own count.

Sources

• IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE EASTERN DISTRICT OF TEXAS MARSHALL DIVISION
• Search Cases by Parties - Search Cases by Parties
• Microsoft Corporation - Microsoft Corporation
• Search Cases by Codes - Search Cases by Codes
• RPX News Search
• 7840619 | NPE Litigation Database
• 25. Without license or authorization and in violation of 35 U
• 10. U
• eHierarchy, LLC
• 8280932 | NPE Litigation Database
• 2:17-cv-00225 | eHierarchy, LLC v. BlackBerry Corporation | RPX Insight
• eHierarchy v. QNAP Inc. - This case was last updated from U

I'll research the docket and counsel of record for eHierarchy, LLC in this case.

Let me dig into the docket details and the identified counsel.

I've found the complaint signature block. Let me verify the full docket for any additional appearances.

Counsel of Record for Plaintiff eHierarchy, LLC — 2:16-cv-00564 (E.D. Tex.)

Sourcing caveat up front: This case was filed May 25, 2016 and closed just 36 days later (June 29, 2016), so the docket is very thin. My confirmation of counsel comes from (a) the complaint's signature block (available via RPX Litigation Documents, which reproduces the filed pleading) and (b) the Justia docket party listing. I could not retrieve the full PACER docket sheet / ECF appearance entries, so I cannot rule out pro hac vice appearances that never generated a separately indexed docket line. Nothing indicates any filing was sealed. No in-house or corporate counsel for eHierarchy appears on the record.

Identified attorneys

1. Richard C. Weinblatt — Lead Counsel

• Firm / office: Stamoulis & Weinblatt LLC (then at Two Fox Point Centre, 6 Denny Road, Suite 307, Wilmington, DE 19809; the firm's later address is 800 N. West St., Third Floor, Wilmington, DE 19801). Delaware Bar No. 5080.
• Record basis: The complaint itself designates him expressly: "Richard C. Weinblatt DE SB #5080 – Lead Counsel" (Compl. signature block, Dkt. 1, filed 05/25/2016, via RPX Litigation Documents). The Justia docket for the case lists "Represented By: Richard C Weinblatt" for the Plaintiff.
• Experience note: A high-volume patent/NPE and Hatch-Waxman plaintiffs' litigator; he is the recurring lead on the eHierarchy campaign (later suits against BlackBerry, 2:17-cv-225 E.D. Tex.; Tumblr and Verizon Media, S.D.N.Y. 2020; QNAP, C.D. Cal. 2019) and has appeared as lead in Delaware pharmaceutical patent litigation (e.g., In re Entresto (Sacubitril/Valsartan) Patent Litigation, D. Del.).

2. Stamatios "Tom" Stamoulis — co-signatory (of counsel / firm co-name partner)

• Firm / office: Stamoulis & Weinblatt LLC, Wilmington, Delaware. Delaware Bar No. 4606.
• Record basis: Co-signed the Dkt. 1 complaint as an attorney for Plaintiff eHierarchy, LLC.
• Status caveat: Because the complaint's caption designated Weinblatt as lead and I could not pull the ECF appearance records, I cannot confirm whether Stamoulis formally entered an appearance in this case or signed only as filing attorney. In the parallel 2017 BlackBerry action he is again listed as co-signer with Weinblatt as lead, and in the 2019 QNAP case he filed a notice that he "will not be appearing as attorney of record" — so his role is best characterized as firm-side co-counsel/of counsel rather than a distinct appearance here.
• Experience note: Delaware-based IP litigator and co-founder of the firm; frequent lead/co-lead in patent and ANDA matters in D. Del. and E.D. Tex.

Local counsel

No Texas local counsel is identified in the materials I could retrieve for this case. The 2017 BlackBerry case filed by eHierarchy did use local Texas counsel — Stafford Davis, The Stafford Davis Firm, P.C., Tyler, TX — but that appearance is in 2:17-cv-225, not in the Microsoft suit, and should not be attributed here without a docket confirming it. If local E.D. Tex. counsel appeared in the Microsoft matter, it would be within the 36-day window and is not reflected in the sources I retrieved.

Notes on the record

• The '619 patent was one of four patents asserted in the single Microsoft complaint (Counts I–IV covering U.S. Pat. Nos. 8,280,932; and the '063, '945, and '619 patents), accusing Microsoft Surface Pro 4, Surface Book, Surface 3, and Windows Phone devices.
• Resolution: the case closed 06/29/2016 (RPX reports the later "latest docket entry" as 10/29/2021, suggesting a post-closure order such as dismissal/settlement-related entry). I could not verify the precise closure document; treat the dismissal mechanics as not independently confirmed.

Bottom line: The counsel of record for plaintiff eHierarchy, LLC is Richard C. Weinblatt (lead) of Stamoulis & Weinblatt LLC, Wilmington, Delaware, with Stamatios Stamoulis of the same firm co-signing the complaint. No in-house counsel, no sealed appearances, and no confirmed Texas local counsel appear on the retrievable record for this specific case.

I'll research the counsel of record for Microsoft in this case.

Let me dig into the docket and related filings.

Interesting — the case closed in 36 days. Let me find the docket entries and any Microsoft appearances.