Wild Sales, LLC et al.

I'll research this case thoroughly before drafting.

Let me dig into the patent and the related case family.

Case overview and background

Caveat up front: Below is what the dockets and patent records actually support. The headline finding is that my research strengthens rather than resolves the doubt flagged in the existing summary — see the patent discussion.

The parties and the underlying dispute. This caption is one thread of a small, tangled, four-case family of tailgating-product patent litigation filed in 2008 by inventor Bradford J. Gleeson and his company Tailgate Nation, Inc. against a broad slice of the sports-tailgating retail and licensing ecosystem. The record shows an unusually fluid alignment of parties: on May 29, 2008, Wild Sales, LLC sued Tailgate Nation and Gleeson in E.D. Mo. (No. 4:08-cv-00772, assigned to Judge Rodney W. Sippel) — facially a declaratory-judgment posture, with Wild Sales as plaintiff and the inventor and his company as defendants. On the same day, case 4:08-cv-00770 was filed with Wild Sales, Tailgate Nation, and Gleeson all listed as co-plaintiffs (Justia docket, "Presiding Judge: Unassigned"). Then on July 11, 2008, Tailgate Nation and Gleeson turned around and sued Wild Sales plus Anheuser-Busch, NFL Enterprises LLC, NFL Productions LLC, IMG, The Sports Authority, Amazon.com, G.I. Joe's, and Toys "R" Us-Delaware in No. 4:08-cv-01040 before Judge Carol E. Jackson, terminated January 28, 2009. That case has an obvious ancestor: Tailgate Nation Inc. et al. v. Top Marketing USA et al., No. 6:08-cv-00167 (D. Or.), filed February 8, 2008 — the date carried on the E.D. Mo. complaint's first document. Stanford's NPE Litigation Database classifies the assertion as "Individual" / "Individual-inventor-started" — i.e., this is an inventor-operated enforcement campaign, not a classic PE/PAE or university assertion. (What Wild Sales actually makes or sells is not documented in the sources I could reach; given its role as a tailgating-goods defendant/alleged infringer, it appears to be an operating seller in that space, but treat that as unverified.)

The patents — and a significant mismatch. The metadata for this case assigns U.S. Patent No. 6,091,343. I pulled the patent's own text: 6,091,343 is titled "Trainable RF transmitter having expanded learning capabilities." It claims a trainable remote-control transmitter that learns the RF characteristics (carrier frequency, modulation type, and security code) of an existing hand-held remote and re-transmits a signal with those learned characteristics — with dependent claims on band-switched VCO/frequency-divider circuitry, dual antennas, country-specific amplitude control data, and FM/AM data slicers. That is the vehicular garage-door-opener / HomeLink-style trainable transmitter art, in the Prince Corporation → Johnson Controls lineage. It has nothing to do with tailgating, and nothing to do with Gleeson, whose patent family in this campaign includes at least U.S. Patent No. 6,808,175 (a "footbolo" football-toss tailgate game with a goalpost target, per the patent text). In other words, the aggregator link between 6,091,343 and Wild Sales, LLC et al. is very likely a false positive, and the previously-flagged skepticism in the case summary is correct — the patent record's litigation list misattributes an unrelated trainable-transmitter patent to a tailgating-case docket number. I could not, within my research budget, pull the No. 4:08-cv-00770 complaint to confirm exactly which Gleeson patent(s) were pleaded there; that is the single most important open item.

Posture and venue. Filed May 29, 2008 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, St. Louis, with no judge assigned to No. 4:08-cv-00770 — the "Unassigned" designation combined with the case's same-day filing alongside Nos. 4:08-cv-00771 and 4:08-cv-00772, and its overlapping party set, suggests an associated or administratively handled filing rather than a fully litigated merits case. Venue significance is straightforward: St. Louis is Gleeson's/Tailgate Nation's home forum and, more pointedly, Anheuser-Busch's headquarters — the natural target for a tailgating-adjacent patent assertion — and the E.D. Mo. dockets for these cases carry the court's internal "Patent Office" designation. That venue choice also imposed a real cost on far-flung retailer/l licensor defendants (Amazon, Toys "R" Us, Sports Authority, NFL entities, IMG), several of which would ordinarily have preferred their home districts; the parallel Oregon filing shows the campaign was simultaneously probing a second forum.

Why it's notable. Three things. First, it is a textbook individual-inventor enforcement campaign against the end of the distribution chain — not just competing manufacturers but licensees, retailers, and leagues — a 2007–2008-era pattern that drew congressional and academic attention and is why Stanford's database tags it "Individual-inventor-started" rather than PAE. Second, it shows the multi-forum, multi-case pressure tactic in miniature: a DJ race to the inventor's home court (Wild Sales' May 29 filing), an inventor-side affirmative suit filed the same day, and a broader retail-sweep complaint refiled in Missouri from an earlier Oregon case. Third, on IPR linkage there is none: the AIA's inter partes review did not exist until September 2012, so this 2008–2009 litigation predates PTAB practice entirely and would have been litigated under pre-AIA § 102/103 and the then-new KSR obviousness regime; no PTAB proceedings on any Gleeson patent appear in the sources I reviewed. Documented outcomes are thin — No. 4:08-cv-01040 terminated January 28, 2009, with Wild Sales dropped as a party and no reported opinion or Federal Circuit appeal that I could locate.

Sources and confidence. Docket headers: Justia dockets for Nos. 4:08-cv-00770, 4:08-cv-00772, 4:08-cv-01040; PacerMonitor and RPX Empower for Nos. 1040/94302; Stanford NPE database party pages for Wild Sales, LLC and G.I. Joe's Inc.; patent text for US 6,091,343 and US 6,808,175. Not verified: the No. 770 complaint and its asserted claims; any outcome or dismissal terms in Nos. 770/771/772; counsel of record for No. 770; and counsel for Gleeson beyond the Stanford/PacerMonitor entries (Ricky D. Klingbeil for plaintiffs; Timothy J. Wolf of Brown & James for Wild Sales in No. 1040). A PACER pull of the No. 770 and No. 772 dockets is the necessary next step to close the patent-identification gap.

I'll research this docket and the patent at issue.

Bottom line first

I was able to verify the existence and basic docket facts of this case and its immediate companion/parallel cases, but I ran out of research budget before I could pull the full PACER dockets, any Rule 12/56 orders, a Markman order, or a disposition document. More importantly, my verification turned up a serious problem with the patent identification in the case metadata, which I need to flag before the chronology — it changes how the "parallel PTAB" question should be answered.

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Source-integrity issue: US 6,091,343 does not appear to belong to this dispute

The metadata in this case record identifies US 6,091,343 as the patent at issue. On independent verification:

• US 6,091,343 — "Trainable RF transmitter having expanded learning capabilities." Issued 2000-07-18; inventors Kurt A. Dykema (Holland, MI), Mark D. Matlin (Boulder, CO), Kenneth R. Zurawski (Louisville, CO); assignee Prince Corporation (Holland, MI); application 08/993,420 filed 1997-12-18; technology is vehicle/garage-door trainable RF transceivers (later Gentex/Johnson Controls patent family).
  • Source: https://patents.justia.com/patent/6091343 (and Unified Patents portal: https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/patent/US-6091343-A)

The parties in this docket — Bradford J. Gleeson, an individual inventor, Tailgate Nation, Inc., and Wild Sales, LLC — have no discernible connection to Prince Corporation or to trainable RF transmitters. The verified litigation family involving these parties is a tailgating-product patent dispute in which Gleeson/Tailgate Nation asserted patent rights against tailgating-product sellers and sports/retail entities, and Wild Sales (a St. Louis-area company, per the docket's "St. Louis – County" designation) was one of the accused infringers, not a co-plaintiff with the patentee.

Conclusion: the "6,091,343" match on this case is, on the present record, most likely an aggregator/indexing mismatch — the same defect the existing case summary already suspected. I could not locate any docket entry or opinion tying '343 to Gleeson, Tailgate Nation, or Wild Sales. Anyone relying on this record should treat the asserted patent number as unverified and probably wrong, and should pull the actual complaint to identify the true patent(s)-in-suit (a tailgate-related Gleeson utility or design patent). I will not state a specific asserted patent number here because I could not source one.

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Verified case family

Three/four dockets are entangled here, and the "legal developments" only make sense as a set:

The 2008-05-29 same-day filing of 4:08-cv-00770 and 4:08-cv-00772 in Wild Sales' home district, roughly 3½ months after being named a defendant in Oregon, is the single most strategically significant event I can confirm: it is a textbook declaratory judgment preemption maneuver aimed at moving the forum fight to St. Louis and away from Judge Aiken in Eugene.

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Chronological developments

1. Filing & initial pleadings

• 2008-02-08 — Gleeson and Tailgate Nation file the Oregon infringement action against Wild Sales and a broad group of retailers, licensees, and sports entities (NFL, IMG, Anheuser-Busch, Amazon, The Sports Authority, Toys "R" Us, G.I. Joe's). D. Or. No. 6:08-cv-00167.
• 2008-05-29 — Wild Sales files E.D. Mo. 4:08-cv-00772 naming Tailgate Nation and Gleeson (DJ action / mirror-image complaint); on the same day 4:08-cv-00770 is opened in E.D. Mo. with the merged caption (Wild Sales / Tailgate Nation / Gleeson).
• Not verified: the content of the complaint in 00770, the answers, counterclaims (infringement counterclaims in the DJ action would be expected), or amended pleadings. These require PACER pulls of 00770 and 00772.

2. Pre-trial motions of substance

• Implied but not documented: a § 1404(a) transfer motion in the Oregon action, given that the identically captioned case (4:08-cv-01040) appears on the E.D. Mo. docket and the Oregon case does not appear to have proceeded to judgment in Oregon. I could not retrieve the transfer order, so the movant, the date, and Judge Aiken's reasoning are unverified.
• Not found: any Rule 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss, motion to stay, or summary-judgment motion/order. No opinion citation surfaced in any reporter for these dockets, which — combined with the January 2009 termination — suggests the case family never generated a published substantive ruling.

3. Claim construction (Markman)

• No Markman order, transcript, or opinion was located for any of the four dockets. Given termination within ~12 months of filing, it is unlikely the case reached a claim-construction hearing. Treat as "did not occur (not definitively confirmed)."

4. Discovery milestones

• None verified. No discovery orders, protective-order disputes, or expert-related rulings surfaced. The only docket-level event I can date with confidence after the pleadings is the 2009-01-28 termination in 4:08-cv-01040 and the termination of Wild Sales as a party in that docket on the same date.

5. Trial, verdict, post-trial motions

• No trial, verdict, JMOL/new-trial motion, or fee motion was located in any of the four dockets. Nothing in the public record suggests any of these cases were tried.

6. Final disposition / present posture

• 4:08-cv-01040 (E.D. Mo.): terminated 2009-01-28, with Wild Sales shown as a terminated party as of that date. This is consistent with a settlement and voluntary dismissal (likely with prejudice) or dismissal under Rule 41(a), but I could not retrieve the dismissal order or any settlement document, so the mechanism is unverified.
• 4:08-cv-00770 and 4:08-cv-00772: the Justia records list then-Judge status as "Unassigned" for 00770 (suggesting it was administratively closed, consolidated into 01040, or reassigned), and Judge Sippel for 00772. I could not verify a termination date or dismissal order for either. Given the 01040 termination date and the overlap in parties, the strong inference is that the entire family resolved together in late January 2009, but this needs a PACER "Terminated" field check.
• No appeal to the Federal Circuit was located for any of these dockets.

7. Parallel PTAB IPR/PGR

• None — and none were possible. The family terminated in January 2009. The Leahy–Smith America Invents Act created the IPR/PGR/CBM trial regimes, which took effect 2012-09-16, and those proceedings cannot be retroactively applied to a 2008–09 district court case. The only

I'll research this case's docket and counsel of record. Let me start with searches on the case number and the patent.

Bottom line

I could not obtain a verified attorney list for Wild Sales, LLC et al. v. [defendants], No. 4:08-cv-00770 (E.D. Mo.). The publicly indexed docket entries for this case (Justia's docket, No. 93444) list the three plaintiffs and the § 1338 patent cause of action but show no "Represented By" counsel block at all, no presiding judge ("Unassigned"), and no viewable documents. I therefore cannot name counsel of record for the '770 plaintiffs without inventing them, and I won't. Below is what the record does support, plus the closest verifiable proxy counsel from the companion cases.

What is verified about the '770 case

The absence of any attorney appearance in the public docket strongly suggests the '770 filing was a caption/party-configuration artifact of a three-case shotgun filing on the same day — 4:08-cv-00770, -00771, and -00772 all appear on the E.D. Mo. patent docket filed 2008-05-29, with Wild Sales and Tailgate Nation/Gleeson swapping sides between them (in '772, Wild Sales is plaintiff against Tailgate Nation and Gleeson). That party scrambling is also why the '343 patent's litigation record flagged this case as an aggregator match needing verification.

Companion cases where plaintiffs' counsel is documented

Because counsel didn't hold still in the '770 docket, the practical answer for "who represented these plaintiffs in this dispute" comes from the parallel actions:

1. Wild Sales, LLC v. Tailgate Nation, Inc. et al., No. 4:08-cv-00772 (E.D. Mo.) — Wild Sales as plaintiff. Justia's entry shows plaintiff Wild Sales "Represented By: Michael J. …" (name truncated in the indexed snippet; firm not captured). Partly verified, incomplete.
2. Wild Sales, LLC v. Tailgate Nation, Inc. et al., No. 1:08-cv-00498 (S.D. Ind., filed 2008-04-17) — declaratory-judgment action, Wild Sales as plaintiff; indexed as "Represented By: Michael D. …" (again truncated). Partly verified, incomplete.
3. Tailgate Nation, Inc. et al. v. Top Marketing USA et al., No. 4:08-cv-01040 (E.D. Mo., filed 2008-07-11, Judge Carol E. Jackson, terminated 2009-01-28) — this is the case that actually carried the infringement claims, with Tailgate Nation and Gleeson as plaintiffs and Wild Sales among the defendants. The indexed docket shows these attorney names in the representation section: J. Christopher Wehrle (Wehrle Law LLC, St. Louis); John D. Ostrander (Elliott & Ostrander, P.C.); Ricky D. Klingbeil (Rick Klingbeil, P.C., St. Louis); and Timothy J. Wolf (Brown & James, P.C., St. Louis). Important caveat: the public snippet does not reliably map each name to a party or role. Brown & James is a St. Louis insurance-defense firm, which is consistent with representing Wild Sales as a defendant; Wehrle, Ostrander, and Klingbeil are more plausibly aligned with the inventor-side plaintiffs (Gleeson/Tailgate Nation), but I cannot confirm that attribution from what I retrieved.
4. Tailgate Nation, Inc. et al. v. Top Marketing USA et al., No. 6:08-cv-00167 (D. Or., filed 2008-02-08) — the original inventor-side suit naming Toys "R" Us, G.I. Joe's, NFL Productions, Anheuser-Busch, Amazon, Sports Authority, IMG, and Wild Sales (per Stanford NPE Litigation Database). Counsel of record there would be the inventor-side lead counsel, but I did not retrieve the D. Or. docket's attorney list.

Role assessment (with confidence levels)

• Bradford J. Gleeson — named plaintiff and the '343 patent's inventor/owner; in the companion filings he appears to have been represented rather than proceeding pro se, but I have no verified pro se or counsel-of-record determination.
• Lead counsel for the inventor-side plaintiffs (Gleeson / Tailgate Nation): candidate — J. Christopher Wehrle (Wehrle Law LLC), John D. Ostrander (Elliott & Ostrander), Ricky D. Klingbeil. Unconfirmed attribution; do not cite as established.
• Lead counsel for Wild Sales: candidate — Timothy J. Wolf (Brown & James, P.C., St. Louis), and/or the "Michael J./Michael D." attorney shown as Wild Sales' counsel in '772 and S.D. Ind. '498. Surname only; unconfirmed.
• Local counsel / of counsel / in-house: none identifiable. No corporate in-house counsel appears anywhere in the public index for these parties.

I also did not locate any Law360 or Reuters Legal coverage of the '770 case, and no PTAB/IPR proceedings — unsurprising for a 2008 filing on a patent that issued in 2000 (US 6,091,343), well before the AIA's IPR regime, and for a case that appears to have been resolved or abandoned within months.

Verification steps to close this out

To get a defensible counsel-of-record list, the following would resolve it in minutes and should be run before any of the above names is used in a filing or publication:

1. PACER, D. Mo. ECF, No. 4:08-cv-00770 — pull the docket report with the "attorneys" flag and open Document 1 (complaint) to read the signature block and certificate of interested parties. If the case shows no appearances, that itself is the finding.
2. Same for 4:08-cv-00772 and 1:08-cv-00498 — the signature blocks will give the full names behind the truncated "Michael J." / "Michael D." entries and the firm.
3. D. Or. No. 6:08-cv-00167 — the appearance and any pro hac vice motions there will identify inventor-side lead counsel for the whole campaign.
4. E.D. Mo. No. 4:08-cv-01040 — check Docs. 1 and any notice of appearance to correctly map Wehrle / Ostrander / Klingbeil / Wolf to plaintiffs versus defendants.

If you can authorize a PACER pull or paste the '770 docket sheet text, I'll convert this into a clean, fully cited counsel table with roles and experience notes.

I'll research the docket and counsel for this case.

Bottom line

I could not verify any attorney of record for the defendant(s) in Wild Sales, LLC et al., No. 4:08-cv-00770 (E.D. Mo.). No PACER image, docket sheet, opinion, or firm bio I could reach names counsel for any party in No. 770 specifically. Per your instruction not to invent attorneys, I am reporting the gap rather than filling it — and flagging a structural problem with the docket itself that has to be resolved before any counsel list can be trusted.

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1. What the docket records actually show (and why the party alignment is unreliable)

Two consequences:

• The aggregator listing for No. 770 is internally contradictory (a case cannot be captioned "Tailgate Nation, Inc. et al" while listing Wild Sales as a plaintiff). The most likely explanation is that the No. 770 record was populated from a neighboring docket (No. 772 is the mirror-image suit filed the same day). This is exactly the kind of artifact your prior case summary suspected, and it means the identity of the defendant in No. 770 — and therefore whose counsel to look for — is currently unresolved.
• The same-day trio (770/771/772) plus the Oregon action suggests parallel, possibly duplicative or declaratory-judgment-driven filings among Wild Sales, Tailgate Nation, and Gleeson. Which side is nominally plaintiff in No. 770 determines whether "defendant's counsel" means Wild Sales' counsel or Tailgate Nation/Gleeson's counsel.

I did not confirm that U.S. Patent No. 6,091,343 was asserted in No. 770. I found no opinion, order, or complaint text tying that number to this docket. Note also the digit-proximity risk: the Gleeson-related patents visible in the record are in the 6.5M–7.0M range (e.g., 6,988,343 B2 "Gleeson et al."; 6,572,637; 6,713,008; 7,037,572). A transposition between 6,091,343 and 6,988,343 — or a mis-keyed patent number in the aggregator feed — is a live possibility that should be tested before the patent-counsel question is even meaningful.

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2. Counsel of record — status

• Lead counsel: not identified.
• Local counsel: not identified.
• Of counsel: not identified.
• In-house: not identified.

No sealing issue is implicated in what I found — the problem is not that filings are sealed, but that I could not reach the docket text (CM/ECF) or any document image for No. 770. The only counsel-adjacent datum located is the truncated "Michael J. ___" entry attached to No. 772, not No. 770; I am deliberately not supplying a surname, because the snippet does not give one and any guess (Hartley, Hart, etc.) would be fabrication.

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3. Exactly what to pull to close this out

1. PACER / CM-ECF docket for 4:08-cv-00770 (E.D. Mo.): Dkt. 1 (complaint caption block, which fixes plaintiff vs. defendant), the summons returns, and the first appearances under Fed. R. Civ. P. 5(a). E.D. Mo. appearances list firm, address, and e-mail — that is the authoritative counsel roster.
2. Corporate disclosure statements (Fed. R. Civ. P. 7.1) for each entity party; these identify parent companies and often the responsible in-house contact.
3. Judge assignment order / Rule 16 scheduling order in No. 770 — the service list is the cleanest single counsel roster.
4. Consolidation or relation order among 770/771/772/01040 — if consolidated, one counsel team may appear across all four, and No. 772's appearance list becomes a proxy for No. 770 (subject to verifying which party "Michael J. ___" represents).
5. CourtListener RECAP (free) as a first check before paying PACER: courtlistener.com/?q=%224:08-cv-00770%22. Also try the Justia docket page directly at the .../docket/missouri/moedce/4:2008cv00770/ path — the -00772 page resolved, so the -00770 page likely exists and will contain the "Represented By" block.
6. D. Or. 6:08-cv-00167 docket for the Wild Sales/Anheuser-Busch/NFL/IMG/Amazon defense team. If the same defense group appears in the Missouri filings, that is a strong lead — but it is a lead only, and I am not asserting it as counsel in No. 770.
7. Patent-number verification: pull the No. 770 complaint's patent paragraph and confirm whether the asserted patent is 6,091,343 or 6,988,343 (or another Gleeson-family patent). This should be done before any further research on the merits.

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4. Confidence statement

If you can supply a PACER PDF of the No. 770 docket sheet (or of Dkt. 1), I can convert the appearance entries into the full counsel table you asked for — names, roles, firms, offices, and litigation histories — in one pass.