XR Communications, LLC d/b/a Vivato Technologies v. Google LLC

I'll research this case thoroughly before writing. Let me start with parallel searches on the core case facts.

Good initial grounding. Now let me dig into the transfer, the IPRs, and the case's current status.

Let me verify the post-transfer docket, the '235 patent's fate, and the NPE background.

Case Overview — XR Communications, LLC d/b/a Vivato Technologies v. Google LLC, No. 6:21-cv-00625-ADA (W.D. Tex.), transferred to No. 3:22-cv-04784-WHO (N.D. Cal.)

The parties. XR Communications, LLC, doing business as Vivato Technologies, is a Delaware LLC with its principal place of business listed at 2809 Ocean Front Walk, Venice, California (Compl. ¶ 10, available via the IPR petition exhibit set at ptacts.uspto.gov). It is a patent-assertion entity, not an operating Wi-Fi vendor: Stanford's NPE Litigation Database classifies XR Communications under "Acquired patents," and it is the sole owner by assignment of the asserted patents (NPE Database). The "Vivato" branding is legacy — the complaint recounts that Vivato was founded in 2000 as an $80M+ venture-backed wireless start-up whose engineering bench included Siavash Alamouti (of Alamouti space-time block-code fame), Ken Biba, William Crilly, James Brennan, Edward Casas, Vahid Tarokh and Marcus Da Silva, and claims 400+ global deployments of beamforming phased-array Wi-Fi base stations (Compl. ¶¶ 11–15). Google LLC is the Alphabet subsidiary based in Mountain View, registered to do business in Texas since 2006 (Compl. ¶ 16). XR was represented by Reza Mirzaie and colleagues at Russ August & Kabat; Google by Barry K. Shelton, Paige Arnette Amstutz, Nicholas H. Lee, Bonnie Phan and Michael A. Berta, among others (per the Justia docket and UniCourt).

The patents and accused technology. The June 16, 2021 complaint asserted two patents from the same Vivato family, both titled "Directed Wireless Communication," both tracing to a November 4, 2002 provisional: U.S. Patent No. 10,594,376 (issued Mar. 17, 2020) and U.S. Patent No. 10,715,235 (issued July 14, 2020). The '376 patent — the patent listed in the case metadata and the one that carried through to resolution — claims a multi-beam "directed signal system" in which an access point's processor and transceiver drive a smart/adaptive antenna assembly to transmit a probing signal over multiple beams to client devices, receive feedback from those clients about the beams, and modify the beams' spatial distribution accordingly (see the Board's framing in the '376 IPR papers, e.g. IPR2022-00613 record). The accused '376 products were Google's MU-MIMO/802.11ac Wi-Fi mesh routers and access points — Nest Wifi Router, Nest Wifi Point and Google Wifi. The '235 patent claims a complementary method: determining a set of weighting values from received signal information, which a remote station uses to construct beam-formed transmissions — essentially MU-MIMO beamforming weight computation. The '235 was asserted against a broader consumer lineup: Nest Cam IQ Outdoor/Indoor, Nest Hello doorbell, Pixel 5, Pixel 4a (5G), Pixel 4a, and Pixelbook Go (UniCourt case summary). In other words, the theory reaches standard-compliant Wi-Fi beamforming, a feature baked into virtually every 802.11ac device.

Procedural posture, venue, and why it matters. XR filed in the Waco Division on Judge Alan D. Albright's docket as part of a coordinated eight-case June–July 2021 blitz: Amazon (6:21-cv-00619), Apple (6:21-cv-00620), ASUSTeK (6:21-cv-00622), Cisco/Meraki (6:21-cv-00623), Samsung (6:21-cv-00626), Dell (6:21-cv-00646), HP (6:21-cv-00694) and Microsoft (6:21-cv-00695), seven of which asserted the '235 patent (see the Court's transfer opinion, CourtListener). Google moved to transfer under §1404(a) on November 24, 2021 (ECF 23; redacted version ECF 25), and Albright granted transfer — crediting the Rope declaration that technical, marketing and financial witnesses sat in Northern California and Kirkland, and citing In re Google LLC, No. 2021-170 (Fed. Cir. Sept. 27, 2021) on the travel-time metric. The case landed in N.D. Cal. as 3:22-cv-04784 on August 19, 2022, first before Judge Haywood Gilliam, then reassigned to Judge William H. Orrick and related to 21-cv-4679-WHO (N.D. Cal. ECF 62–64). The venue story is the headline: this is one of the wave of 2021–22 §1404(a)/mandamus rulings that began peeling standard-infringement cases out of Waco, and it shows a defendant prevailing on transfer even where the plaintiff had filed a multi-defendant Texas cluster. On the PTAB side, **

I'll research this case systematically, starting with the docket and PTAB proceedings.

Let me dig into the docket, the transfer ruling, and the IPR details.

Interesting — there's a transfer saga. Let me trace it.

I'll search from several angles — the caption, party names, the patent number, and the IPR — then report what I actually find.

The first round returned mostly court records and dockets rather than press. Let me search press-specific angles.

Still mostly primary documents. Let me try press-specific and outcome angles.

Bottom line: I found no press coverage of this specific case

I searched the caption ("XR Communications v. Google," 6:21-cv-00625), the party names (Vivato Technologies / XR Communications / Google), the patent number (10,594,376), the parallel IPR (IPR2022-00613), and outcome terms (transfer, dismissal, settlement, verdict). Across those searches I did not find a single article from Reuters, Bloomberg Law, Law360, Ars Technica, The Verge, IPWatchdog, Patently-O, EFF, JD Supra, or any trade outlet that discusses XR Communications v. Google itself. What the searches returned instead were primary records and litigation databases: the CourtListener opinion page hosting Judge Albright's § 1404(a) transfer order, Casetext/vLex copies of the same order, the Justia docket for the transferred N.D. Cal. case, RPX Insight's litigation profile, UniCourt's case summary, and PTAB institution decisions hosted via Docket Alarm. These are court documents and commercial dockets, not journalism, so I am not treating them as press coverage and will not characterize them as reporting.

The closest thing to press coverage I located concerns the same plaintiff and the same patent campaign but a different defendant: IP Law Daily (Bloomberg Law's IP Law Daily, hosted at vitallaw.com) published an article dated 2022-08-22 by Kevin M. Finson on XR Communications v. HP Inc., in which Judge Albright granted HP's transfer motion on 2022-08-17, finding four convenience factors favored transfer and none weighed against it. That article notes Vivato "filed suit for infringement, along with several other suits for infringement of the same patent against other defendants, in the Western District of Texas," and identifies counsel — Christian W. Conkle of Russ August & Kabat for XR Communications and Aamir A. Kazi of Fish & Richardson for HP. It does not mention Google. I flag it only because it is the one piece of genuine legal-trade-press reporting on the Vivato campaign that my searches surfaced, and because it corroborates the pattern that drove this case's outcome.

Where the record (not the press) goes: the complaint was filed 2021-06-16 before Judge Alan D. Albright in Waco as No. 6:21-cv-00625-ADA, asserting the '376 patent against Google's MU-MIMO Wi-Fi access points and routers (Nest Wifi Router, Nest Wifi Point, Google Wifi) and, per the UniCourt summary of the complaint, also the '235 patent — a two-patent scope that differs from the single-patent framing in the case metadata I was given. Google moved to transfer to N.D. Cal. under § 1404(a) on 2021-11-24 (ECF No. 23), and the case was transferred in on 2022-08-19, docketed there as No. 3:22-cv-04784 and eventually reassigned under a -HSG suffix. On the PTAB side, the IPR2023-00174 institution decision records that IPR2022-00613 (Samsung, Samsung America, Google, and Cisco as petitioners) was instituted on 2022-10-20 over claims 1–34 of the '376 patent, and that eero was joined in May 2023, with Netgear filing IPR2023-00136. I could not verify from any source I found how the N.D. Cal. case ultimately resolved, and I found no reported damages figure, settlement term, or trial outcome — so any such number should be treated as unconfirmed.

Two caveats worth stating plainly. First, because Google filed its transfer motion sealed and the press appears never to have picked the case up, there is no reporting to compare against the court record — there are no analyst takes, executive statements, or industry-reaction quotes to weigh, and I have not invented any. Second, my searches for the outcome and for the IPR2022-00613 institution decision were cut short by a tool-step limit, so it is possible that trade coverage of the transfer, the IPR, or a later dismissal exists in a paywalled Law360 or Bloomberg Law database that does not surface in open web search; the absence of coverage I report here is an absence in what I could actually retrieve, not a certified absence of all coverage.

Method note: every URL above was returned by my searches. Items from CourtListener, Casetext/vLex, Justia, RPX, UniCourt, Docket Alarm, and PTAB filings are primary court records or commercial dockets and are cited as such, not as press.

Sources

• UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE WESTERN DISTRICT OF TEXAS WACO DIVISION
• UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT WESTERN DISTRICT OF TEXAS WACO DIVISION
• XR Communications LLC v. Google LLC – CourtListener.com - XR Communications LLC v. Google LLC, 6:21-cv-00625 (W.D. Tex. 2022)
• Cases containing Opinions or Orders filed in Texas matching "google"
• XR Commc'ns v. Google LLC - XR Commc'ns v. Google LLC
• XR Commc'ns v. Google LLC - From Casetext: Smarter Legal Research
• XR Communications LLC v. Google LLC > Summary
• UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE
• XR Commc'ns v. Google LLC - Second, Vivato claims that Google's concerns with travel inconveniences “are not grounded in the reality of how Google litigates...
• XR Communications LLC v. Google LLC - This case was last updated from U
• Search court records on patent:(10594376)
• US-10594376-B2 - Directed Wireless Communication - US-10594376-B2 - Directed Wireless CommunicationReport ErrorAsk PattyBetaHello! I’m Patty, your assistant for patent-related que...

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

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

Counsel of Record — Google LLC

XR Communications, LLC d/b/a Vivato Technologies v. Google LLC, No. 6:21-cv-00625-ADA (W.D. Tex.)

⚠️ Threshold note on case posture (affects the answer): The docket shows this W.D. Tex. action was transferred to the Northern District of California on Aug. 19, 2022, on Google's § 1404(a) motion, and re-docketed as No. 3:22-cv-04784-WHO before Judge William H. Orrick (related to No. 21-cv-4679-WHO). See XR Commc'ns LLC v. Google LLC, No. 6:21-cv-00625-ADA (W.D. Tex. 2022) (transfer opinion, ECF No. 23 granted); Dkt. 62–63 (N.D. Cal. relating/reassignment orders). The W.D. Tex. docket reflects a termination date of Aug. 19, 2022. Counsel of record therefore spans two dockets — the W.D. Tex. appearances (2021–2022) and the N.D. Cal. appearances (2022 onward). I list both, since the local-counsel roster changed materially at transfer.

Core trial team — Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer LLP (national/lead)

Texas local counsel (W.D. Tex. phase)

In-house

No Google in-house attorney (e.g., Google Legal / litigation counsel) appears on the W.D. Tex. or N.D. Cal. dockets in the entries I reviewed. If one exists, it is not reflected in the public appearance record.

Consistency with the parallel PTAB proceedings (useful corroboration)

Google's IPR counsel is the same Arnold & Porter team, which corroborates the district-court roster:

• IPR2022-00613 ('376 patent, Samsung/Samsung America/Google/Cisco petitioners): Arnold & Porter — Jennifer A. Sklenar, Paul Margulies, Ali R. Sharifahmadian (601 Massachusetts Ave. NW, Washington, DC).
• IPR2022-01362 ('235 patent): Arnold & Porter — Sharifahmadian (lead) and Margulies (backup); service correspondence to Google used the alias xGoogleXR@arnoldporter.com.
• Nicholas Lee's A&P letterhead (Los Angeles, +1 213.243.4156) appears as an exhibit in IPR2022-01362, tying him to both forums.

What I could not verify (do not treat as established)

• Paige Arnette Amstutz's firm and office — not confirmed from a primary source here.
• Bonnie Phan's and Michael D.K. Nguyen's firm/office — inferred from joint PHV motions with Lee; not independently confirmed.
• Whether any attorney listed above remains of record in N.D. Cal. as of today (Google frequently substitutes counsel after transfer; the latest N.D. Cal. docket entries I could see are from 2022). A current N.D. Cal. 3:22-cv-04784 docket pull (or the W.D. Tex. docket's transfer/CM-ECF extract) should be run to confirm.
• No sealed or under-seal appearance records were identified; the sealing in this case (ECF No. 23 and its exhibits) went to Google's transfer-motion evidence, not to counsel identities.

Sourcing: Dockets.justia.com docket sheet for XR Commc'ns LLC v. Google LLC, No. 3:22-cv-04784 (N.D. Cal.) (carrying over W.D. Tex. ECF Nos. 14–16, 21, 23, 25, 28, 29, 31, 32 and N.D. Cal. ECF Nos. 52, 61, 62, 63); UniCourt docket summary for No. 3:22-cv-04784 (defendant attorneys: Amstutz, Lee, Berta, Phan); Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer signature blocks in N.D. Cal. filings (e.g., No. 3:22-cv-04807, Dkt. 71) and PTAB exhibits; A&P Feb. 8, 2011 press release on Berta's arrival; PTAB IPR2022-00613 and IPR2022-01362 papers for the A&P IPR team; transfer opinion text via CourtListener/vLex.