XR Communications, LLC d/b/a Vivato Technologies v. AT&T Inc. et al.

I'll research the case and its parties, patents, and procedural history.

Overview and Background

The parties. The plaintiff is XR Communications, LLC, which litigates under the trade name Vivato Technologies — the entity that owns the patent portfolio of Vivato, the early-2000s "directed wireless"/smart-antenna Wi-Fi base-station developer. XR Communications does not make or sell products; Stanford's NPE Litigation Database classifies the '202 case as a non-practicing-entity suit (https://npe.law.stanford.edu/case/[270677](/patent/270677)), and RPX tracks it as the "Vivato Technologies campaign" (https://insight.rpxcorp.com/news/details?searchq=ents%3A%28424632%29). The defendants were AT&T Inc., AT&T Services Inc., AT&T Mobility LLC, and AT&T Corp.; AT&T Inc. itself was voluntarily dismissed without prejudice by stipulation in July 2023 (Dkt. 21, filed 7/14/2023), leaving the operating/service entities (https://dockets.justia.com/docket/texas/txedce/2:2023cv00202/[222063](/patent/222063)). Critically, the real parties in interest on the defense side were the infrastructure vendors: Ericsson Inc. and Nokia of America Corporation intervened in all three carrier suits (see the Joint Claim Construction Chart, Dkt. 76/exhibit; IPR2024-00868, Paper 4 at 2), because the accused radios are theirs. Plaintiff's counsel is Russ August & Kabat (Reza Mirzaie, Philip Wang, Marc Fenster, Adam Hoffman et al.); AT&T's local counsel is Gillam & Smith (Melissa Richards Smith), with Deron Dacus also appearing.

The technology accused. XR did not accuse AT&T of making anything. It accused AT&T's network — specifically "cellular base stations / 5G NR RAN solutions that support 3GPP 5G NR beamforming," i.e., Ericsson- and Nokia-supplied LTE and 5G massive-MIMO/beamforming radios deployed in AT&T's commercial network, plus the resulting 5G service (Compl. ¶¶ 29–33, 42–43; AT&T's subscriber scale — over 196 million — was pleaded at ¶ 26). The theory is a classic standards-based, "inherent infringement" theory: the accused equipment's ordinary 3GPP-compliant beamforming, feedback, and multi-beam operation is alleged to practice the claims. All three carrier complaints were filed the same day and consolidated for pretrial in the AT&T case as lead (Consolidation Order, Dkt. 19, signed June 13, 2023).

Patents asserted. The AO 120 filed with the complaint lists five: 7,177,369 ("Multipath Communication Methods and Apparatuses," issued 2/13/2007) — measures a multipath transmission delay on the reverse (uplink) path and derives a forward-path pre-equalization parameter to pre-distort the downlink signal; 8,737,511 ("Directed MIMO Communications," issued 5/27/2014, filed 4/13/2012) — m antenna arrays each generating multiple beams, with cross-connected MIMO transceivers so the i-th received signal at the j-th receiver maps to the j-th beam of the i-th array (beamforming + MIMO for range/throughput); 8,289,939 ("Signal Communication Coordination," issued 10/16/2012) — coordinates co-located access points/beams so one does not transmit while another receives, avoiding "thrashing"; 10,594,376 ("Directed Wireless Communication," issued 3/17/2020, App. 15/486,245, priority to provisional 60/423,660 filed 11/4/2002) — multiple directed beams with selective transmission nulls/peaks, adjusted using client feedback; and 10,715,235, a member of the same directed-wireless-communication family (its claims use "transmission nulls"). Two cautions: (i) several AI-generated complaint summaries circulating online mislabel 8,289,939 as a plastics/blow-molding patent (that is 9,289,939, an unrelated number) — do not rely on them; (ii) as noted in the earlier case summary, XR narrowed over time — the '376 was off the pretrial list by the August 2024 claim construction chart (which addressed only the '369, '939, '511 and '235), and the final election left the '369 and '511. I did not locate the election notice itself, so the precise date and scope of each narrowing step should be confirmed against the docket.

Posture, venue, and why it matters

The case sat in the Marshall Division before District Judge Rodney Gilstrap with Magistrate Judge Roy S. Payne, in the district that remains the default NPE venue for wireless-infrastructure campaigns; Gilstrap's docket and Marshall's trial schedule gave XR a single consolidated pretrial track against all three national carriers at once. Claim construction ran through 2024 (Joint Claim Construction and Prehearing Statement, Dkt. 76, 6/11/2024; XR's opening brief, Dkt. 81, 7/15/2024; joint chart, 8/28/2024), and the court issued a substantive Markman opinion (Dkt. 99) construing, inter alia, "forward path pre-equalization parameter" in the '369 and the '939 terms — the exact date of that opinion is not confirmed in the sources I could reach. Notably, defendants filed an opposed motion to stay pending IPR (Dkt. 78, July 2024) but withdrew it two weeks later (Dkt. 83–84, 7/29–30/2024), so the case proceeded on the merits rather than being stayed. Trial was set for late 2025 (defendants moved to continue the trial date in September 2025, Dkt. 271); the parties mediated before former E.D. Tex. Chief Judge David Folsom on September 25, 2025, which initially reported "suspended" as to Ericsson (Dkt. 277) but was followed by an amended report confirming a settlement (Dkt. 295, 11/4/2025). XR then filed a joint motion to dismiss (Dkt. 298, 12/22/2025), and Judge Gilstrap dismissed XR's claims with prejudice and defendants'/Ericsson's counterclaims without prejudice on January 8, 2026 (Dkt. 299; AO 120 at Dkt. 300). A further joint motion to dismiss appears at Dkt. 301 (7/9/2026) addressing the consolidated cases; I have not verified its disposition.

Why it is notable. Three things. First, it is a value-chain escalation story: XR/Vivato spent 2015–2023 suing Wi-Fi equipment makers (Cisco, D-Link, Netgear, Ruckus, Ubiquiti, Samsung, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Dell, ASUS) in C.D. Cal. and W.D. Tex., then pivoted to the carriers themselves — a materially deeper pocket — with the same early-2000s beamforming/MIMO family, and then doubled down

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

Let me pull the full docket and key orders.

XR Communications (Vivato) v. AT&T — Chronology of Key Developments

Case: XR Communications, LLC d/b/a Vivato Technologies v. AT&T Inc., AT&T Services Inc., AT&T Mobility LLC & AT&T Corp., No. 2:23-cv-00202-JRG-RSP (E.D. Tex., Marshall Div.) — Judge J. Rodney Gilstrap; Magistrate Judge Roy S. Payne. Consolidated pretrial with the Verizon (2:23-cv-00203) and T-Mobile (2:23-cv-00204) cases, later the second-wave cases (2:23-cv-00468/-469/-470) asserting the '256 and '569 patents.

A note on sourcing up front: the docket is closed and most of what follows is drawn from RECAP/CourtListener filings and orders (docket numbers cited), the PTAB docket, and trade press (RPX, PTAB Litigation Blog). A handful of dates below — AT&T's answer date, the Markman hearing date, and the precise trial setting — I could not verify to the day and are flagged accordingly.

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1. Filing and initial pleadings (2023)

• 2023-05-08 — Complaint filed (Dkt

I'll search several angles to find press coverage of this case.

Initial searches surfaced mostly docket aggregators. Let me search specifically for trade press coverage.

No mainstream press yet. Let me try more targeted outlet-specific searches.

Press coverage: essentially none found

I ran multiple searches — the case caption, plaintiff and defendant names, the individual patent numbers (10,594,376; 7,177,369; 8,737,511), and settlement/dismissal angles — and found no reporting on this case from Reuters, Bloomberg Law, Law360, IPWatchdog, Ars Technica, The Verge, JD Supra, or any other news or trade outlet. What the searches returned instead was exclusively litigation-data infrastructure rather than journalism: CourtListener and UniCourt dockets, RPX Insight, PACER Monitor, Docket Alarm, the Stanford NPE Litigation Database, govinfo's PDF collection of E.D. Tex. filings, and Patent Case Watch, which merely reflows court PDFs. None of these is a press account, and I did not find a single bylined news article about the 2023 AT&T case, the consolidated Verizon and T-Mobile actions, the Ericsson/Nokia interventions, or the eventual settlement.

The closest thing to "coverage" is a vendor blog post, PatSnap Eureka, which describes the case as a "landmark" NPE action over directed-MIMO, multipath and beamforming patents embedded in 4G LTE and 5G infrastructure, and states that Judge Gilstrap granted a joint motion to dismiss on 2026-01-08 (Dkt. No. 299), dismissing XR's claims with prejudice and defendants' counterclaims without prejudice, with no damages figure disclosed — which it reads as "strongly indicating a confidential settlement agreement." I would treat this with real caution rather than cite it as reporting: it is an automated litigation-summary product, not journalism, it offers no sourcing beyond docket numbers, and its patent descriptions are demonstrably garbled (it labels the '369 patent "Directed MIMO communications," which is the title of the separate '256 patent, and it omits the '939/'235/'376 confusion visible elsewhere on its own page). Its analytical claims — that the dismissal structure is "a protective defense term worth negotiating" and signals "coordinated licensing economics" — are unsourced speculation, not industry reaction.

To be clear about what is court record rather than press: the docket shows a joint stipulation dismissing the '376 patent on 2024-02-23 (Dkt. 73, with each side bearing its own costs), a mediation before David Folsom that produced a settlement, a joint motion to stay all deadlines and notice of settlement filed 2025-10-27 and granted 2025-10-28, and the dismissal order of 2026-01-08 mirrored in the AO 120 form at Dkt. 300. Notably, the settlement came after the September 2025 trial date collapsed — the parties had been preparing a consolidated three-carrier trial before Judge Gilstrap with a 2025-09-22 jury selection — and after Magistrate Judge Payne issued reports and recommendations on the dueling summary-judgment motions (Dkt. 268, 269). None of that sequence, and no damages number, has been reported anywhere in the press that I could locate.

Bottom line: for a case with three major carriers, two network-equipment intervenors, and a consolidated E.D. Tex. trial date, this litigation generated no detectable press footprint. If you need a citable narrative for a filing or client memo, the docket and the AO 120 forms are the only reliable sources; I would not cite the PatSnap post, and I would not characterize the absence of coverage as evidence that the settlement was small — the terms are simply sealed and unreported.

Sources

• XR Communications LLC d/b/a Vivato Technologies v. AT&T Services Inc. et al (2:25-cv-00699), Texas Eastern District Court
• AO 120 (Rev
• Case 2:23-cv-00202-JRG-RSP Document 300 Filed 01/08/26 Page 1 of 1 PagelD #:
• 2:25-cv-00699 | XR Communications LLC v. AT&T Services Inc | Ex Parte
• Complaint analysis | 2:23-cv-00202 | XR Communications LLC v. AT&T Inc | Ex Parte
• XR Communications LLC d/b/a Vivato Technologies v. T- Mobile USA, Inc. - United States Government Publishing Office
• XR Communications LLC d/b/a Vivato Technologies v. AT&T Inc. et al - This case was last updated from U
• Pretrial Conference - Initial – #254 in XR Communications LLC d/b/a Vivato Technologies v. AT&T Inc. (E.D. Tex., 2:23-cv-00202) – CourtListener.com - XR Communications LLC d/b/a Vivato Technologies v. AT&T Inc.
• Miscellaneous Relief – #172 in XR Communications LLC d/b/a Vivato Technologies v. AT&T Inc. (E.D. Tex., 2:23-cv-00202) – CourtListener.com - XR Communications LLC d/b/a Vivato Technologies v. AT&T Inc.
• Stipulation – #73 in XR Communications LLC d/b/a Vivato Technologies v. AT&T Inc. (E.D. Tex., 2:23-cv-00202) – CourtListener.com - XR Communications LLC d/b/a Vivato Technologies v. AT&T Inc.
• IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE EASTERN DISTRICT OF TEXAS MARSHALL DIVISION
• Proposed Order – #196, Att. #1 in XR Communications LLC d/b/a Vivato Technologies v. AT&T Inc. (E.D. Tex., 2:23-cv-00202) – CourtListener.com - 🚀 CourtListener is now available in ChatGPT

I'll research the counsel of record for XR Communications (Vivato Technologies) in this case.

Let me pull the docket sheet and the complaint signature block to confirm lead counsel.

Plaintiff-side counsel of record — XR Communications, LLC d/b/a Vivato Technologies

Bottom line: Vivato was represented by a two-firm team — Russ August & Kabat (RAK) of Los Angeles as lead/principal counsel, with a Dallas-office RAK attorney handling Texas admissions, and Miller Fair Henry PLLC of Longview, Texas as East Texas local/trial counsel. The roster below is drawn from RAK signature blocks in filings in this consolidated proceeding (e.g., Dkt. 221, July 3, 2025 sur-reply exhibit; Dkt. 30 notice of compliance in member case 2:23-cv-470), the PTAB power of attorney in the parallel '376 IPR, notices of appearance on the CourtListener RECAP docket, and the attendance/argument record from the Aug. 29, 2025 pretrial conference (Dkt. 254).

Roster of record

Notes on roles and uncertainties

• No in-house counsel for Vivato appears on the docket; XR Communications is a licensing entity (manager Kai Hansen signed the PTAB powers of attorney), and all appearances are outside counsel.
• Lead vs. local designation: the docket does not carry a formal "lead counsel" designation order. Functionally, Fenster/Mirzaie led for RAK with Fair as East Texas local and trial counsel; Fair is the attorney the magistrate judge treated as spokesperson for the plaintiff at the pretrial conference ("Andrea Fair introduced co-counsel and announced ready," Dkt. 254).
• One anomaly worth flagging: Dkt. 29 in this proceeding bears a signature block for Melissa Smith (Gillam & Smith, LLP, Marshall) styled "Counsel for Plaintiff." Gillam & Smith is predominantly defense-side local counsel in E.D. Tex.; this appears to be a joint/consolidated filing rather than a plaintiff appearance, and I could not confirm a plaintiff appearance by her. Treat as unverified.
• Not directly verified on PACER: I worked from CourtListener RECAP images and docket entries, PTAB filings, and secondary trackers (UniCourt, RPX, PacerMonitor) rather than a live PACER docket pull. The docket itself is not sealed; the counsel list above is reconstructed from signed filings and is reliable as to the named attorneys, but a live PACER "ATTORNEYS" tab would be the authoritative cross-check for any appearance withdrawn before the October 2025 closure.
• Posture: the docket tracker shows the case closed on Oct. 3, 2025 (after the Sept. 22, 2025 trial setting before Judge Gilstrap). I did not independently confirm in this research whether closure followed verdict, settlement, or voluntary dismissal — worth a separate check before relying on it.

I'll research the defense-side appearances on this docket, starting with the docket sheet and firm announcements.

Good initial hits. Now let me dig into the docket's attorney list, the pretrial appearance sheet, and whether Ericsson/Nokia had separate counsel.

Now let me verify the individual attorneys' roles and gather their backgrounds from firm bios.

Counsel of Record — Defendants

Bottom line: AT&T's defense was run by a single, unusually centralized team from Duane Morris LLP out of Atlanta, with Gillam & Smith LLP (Marshall/Tyler) and The Dacus Firm (Tyler) supplying the local E.D. Tex. presence. Unusually, the same Duane Morris lawyers also represented the two intervenors, Ericsson and Nokia, and the consolidated Verizon and T-Mobile defendants — so the defense table in the lead case was effectively one joint defense group, not three carrier-specific teams. Everything below is drawn from appearances and signature blocks on the lead docket (2:23-cv-00202-JRG-RSP); I have flagged where an attorney appears only in a signature block and may not have filed a separate AO 458.

A. Counsel for AT&T (the named defendants in this case)

B. Local counsel for the defense group

C. Consolidated co-defendants and intervenors on the same docket

Because the pretrial consolidation order (Dkt. 19, 2023-06-14) routed all filings into 2:23-cv-00202, the Verizon (2:23-cv-00203) and T-Mobile (2:23-cv-00204) defendants and Intervenors Ericsson and Nokia are represented by the same Duane Morris/Gillam & Smith/Dacus roster above (see Dkt. 36, 49–51, 146). I found no separate law firm appearing for Ericsson or Nokia in the lead case — a notable point, since Ericsson and Nokia are ordinarily adverse to carriers in SEP disputes and typically retain their own trial counsel.

D. Caveats

• No in-house counsel for AT&T appears on the docket. Nothing suggests an AT&T legal-department attorney entered an appearance; if in-house counsel attended depositions or mediations, that is not reflected in filed records.
• Additional appearances likely exist. Third-party aggregators indicate roughly a dozen-plus defense-side attorney records in this consolidated proceeding (UniCourt lists "11 more attorneys" beyond the two shown), and I did not individually verify every AO 458 filed between 2023 and 2026. PACER/the CourtListener docket for No. 2:23-cv-00202 is authoritative.
• No withdrawal entries came up for any of the above in my searches; I cannot affirm that none exist.
• Minor data inconsistency flagged: a third-party litigation page (ai-lab.exparte.com) lists the case as "Closed (10/03/25)," while the docket and AO 120 (Dkt. 300) show the dismissal order entered 2026-01-08. The docket controls.

Sources: Dkt. 36 (Gibson appearance, 2023-08-16) — courtlistener PDF; Dkt. 49/50/51 (Ericsson/Nokia appearances, 2023-09-25) — Dkt. 49, Dkt. 50, Dkt. 51; Dkt. 27 (Gorham, 2023-07-19) —