XR Communications, LLC d/b/a Vivato Technologies v. Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. et al.

I'll research this case across multiple sources before drafting.

Good foundation. Now let me dig into the consolidation, the accused products, the parties' corporate background, and the IPR outcome.

Case Overview & Background

Parties. Plaintiff XR Communications, LLC, doing business as Vivato Technologies, is a Delaware LLC with its principal place of business in Venice, California, and describes itself as sole owner by assignment of the asserted patents (Compl. ¶10, as reproduced in the RPX litigation document for this case). It is not an operating manufacturer today: it is a licensing/assertion entity whose sole business is monetizing the patent portfolio of Vivato, the venture-backed Wi‑Fi infrastructure startup founded in 2000 (reportedly $80M+ raised) whose engineers included Siavash Alamouti, Ken Biba, William Crilly, James Brennan, Edward Casas and Vahid Tarokh (Compl. ¶11). Vivato built beamforming phased-array Wi‑Fi base stations and claimed 400+ deployments before winding down; XR Communications now holds what the complaint calls a portfolio of 17+ issued patents, and academic/industry databases classify it as an NPE asserting a failed startup's original portfolio (Stanford NPE Litigation Database entry for US 7,177,369′s family; RPX and Unified Patents both track it as an NPE campaign). Defendants are Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. (Suwon, Korea) and its wholly owned U.S. subsidiary [Samsung Electronics America, Inc.](/litigations/by-plaintiff/Samsung%20Electronics%20America%2C%20Inc.) (Ridgefield Park, N.J.), which the complaint ties to the district through Austin and Round Rock, Texas facilities employing roughly 10,000 people (Compl. ¶¶16–19). Put simply: a small, patent-holding successor to a defunct Wi‑Fi pioneer suing the world's largest consumer-electronics and smartphone maker over standardized Wi‑Fi beamforming.

Accused technology and patents. The case is a standards-practice story, not a copying story. The patent at issue in this entry, U.S. Patent No. 10,594,376 ("Directed wireless communication," issued March 17, 2020, claims 1–34, inventors Marcus Da Silva, William J. Crilly Jr., James Brennan, Robert J. Conley, Eduardo Casas, Siavash Alamouti et al., priority to Provisional 60/423,660 filed Nov. 4, 2002), claims a multi-beam directed-signal system: a processor generates a probing signal to at least two client devices, receives per-client feedback (amplitude/phase/routing/CSI-type information), computes where to place transmission peaks and nulls, and then transmits two data streams simultaneously with a peak steered at each client's location. In plain terms, it is an apparatus claim mapping onto 802.11ac Wave 2 / 802.11ax (Wi‑Fi 6) MU‑MIMO channel sounding and beamforming — NDP announcement/NDP sounding frames out, compressed beamforming feedback back, steering matrix applied, simultaneous DL MU‑MIMO streams. Vivato's infringement contentions in the parallel campaign chart exactly that mapping against access points and routers supporting MU‑MIMO (e.g., the eero/Amazon contentions, Dkt. in 6:21‑cv‑00619). The Samsung complaint targeted the SmartThings Wifi mesh system and, for the companion patent, the Galaxy S21 Ultra (per a structured analysis of the complaint, ¶¶28–34, 47–49). A second patent, U.S. Patent No. 10,715,235 ("Directed wireless communication"), a continuation sharing substantially the same specification, was co-asserted in this same case (Samsung acknowledged the '235 assertion in its Aug. 10, 2022 IPR stipulation letter in 6:21‑cv‑00626); its claims are the receive-side mirror — receiving simultaneous peaked/nulled signals, deriving signal information, computing weighting values that the remote station uses to construct beamformed transmissions. The 2023 member case added Galaxy-series smartphones and tablets and Samsung-series TVs supporting MIMO/MU‑MIMO (RPX campaign report). Caveat: the June 16, 2021 complaint attached three exhibits, so a third patent may have been pleaded; the public sources I could reach confirm only the '376 and '235 as asserted against Samsung, so treat "two asserted patents" as well-sourced but not exhaustive.

Posture, venue, and why it matters. Filed June 16, 2021 in the [U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, Waco Division](/courts/western-district-of-texas-waco), before Judge Alan D. Albright (Case No. 6:21‑cv‑00626‑ADA), as one of roughly ten complaints XR filed that same day against Apple, Google, Cisco/Meraki, Comcast, Amazon/eero, ASUSTek, ARRIS, Belkin, Netgear, D‑Link, Ubiquiti and Ruckus. The venue choice was deliberate and is the standard W.D. Tex. playbook: Samsung's Austin/Round Rock presence satisfies the § 1400(b) "regular and established place of business" prong post-TC Heartland, and Albright's docket was then the fastest and most plaintiff-favorable patent venue in the country. Procedurally, plaintiff voluntarily dropped induced/contributory infringement, enhanced damages, and permanent injunctive relief by joint motion (order entered Sept. 13, 2021); a scheduling order issued Jan. 13, 2022; the Markman hearing was reset to July 1, 2022 by Zoom (Order, May 23, 2022); the case was consolidated on March 3, 2023 with a new Samsung suit, 6:23‑cv‑00125 (626 designated lead, 125 member); and both were dismissed on a joint motion filed June 1, 2023 and granted June 8, 2023. No claim construction ruling, summary judgment, trial, or merits validity decision ever issued. In parallel, Samsung (with Google and Cisco) filed IPR2022‑00613 on March 3, 2022 challenging all '376 claims 1–34 over Gerlach in view of Barratt; the Board instituted on October 20, 2022, and later granted follow-on joinder to eero (IPR2023‑00174, instituted May 19, 2023) and Netgear/Aruba (IPR2023‑00136, instituted May 22, 2023) on the same grounds. The case's notability is threefold. First, it is a textbook NPE standards-essentiality-by-litigation campaign: a defunct startup's 2002-era beamforming work asserted against features (MU‑MIMO sounding) that are now mandatory in Wi‑Fi 5/6/6E/7 silicon, raising the familiar problem that practicing the IEEE standard may equal practicing the claim. Second, its IPR linkage is unusually rich — a single instituted Samsung IPR served as the vehicle for a joinder stack of competitors (Google, Cisco, Aruba, Netgear, eero), and after the July 6, 2023 termination of Samsung, Google, eero and Aruba as settled petitioners (settlement agreements sealed under 35 U.S.C. § 317), Cisco and Netgear continued until termination in October 2023. Third, it generated a notable PTAB procedural ruling: Ubiquiti's bid to reopen the terminated IPR and join out of time was rejected in IPR2024‑00148 (Paper 12, May 6, 2024), with the Board holding it had no authority to reopen a properly terminated IPR and that the joinder time-bar exception could not apply where there was no proceeding to join. Market-wise, the resolution is consistent with the rest of the campaign — XR's claims against Amazon/eero and against AT&T/Verizon (E.D.

I'll research this case across dockets, PTAB, and legal press. Let me start with several parallel searches.

Good foundation. Now let me dig into the district court docket specifics — answer/counterclaims, the stay order, and Markman outcome.

Case Timeline: XR Communications, LLC d/b/a Vivato Technologies v. Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. et al., No. 6:21-cv-00626-ADA (W.D. Tex.)

Bottom line up front: This case never reached claim construction on the merits in its own docket, never reached trial, and produced no verdict, JMOL, or fee award. It was stayed pending IPR, then dismissed by joint motion in June 2023 after the parties settled, with Samsung simultaneously terminating itself from the parallel PTAB proceeding. The '376 patent also expired on 2023-11-03, ending the campaign against Samsung as to that patent.

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1. Filing and initial pleadings (2021)

Caveat: I could not verify the contents or filing date of Samsung's answer and counterclaims from the available sources. The docket records an answer deadline (2021-10-04) but the retrieved docket excerpts and third-party dockets do not show the answer document. Whether Samsung pleaded invalidity/non-infringement counterclaims should be confirmed against PACER.

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2. Parallel PTAB proceeding opens: IPR2022-00613 (2022)

I'll search for press coverage across multiple angles.

Initial results are mostly docket and PTAB records. Let me search specifically for legal-press and industry coverage.

No mainstream or trade press hits yet. Let me try targeted searches on outlets and for settlement/SEC disclosures.

Press and Media Coverage

Bottom line: I found essentially no published news or analysis coverage of this specific case. Despite searching the case caption, both party names (XR Communications, Vivato Technologies, and Samsung Electronics Co./America), the patent number (10,594,376), the PTAB proceeding numbers (IPR2022-00613 and IPR2022-01362), and the settlement/dismissal, my searches did not surface a single bylined article from Reuters, Bloomberg Law, Law360, Ars Technica, The Verge, IPWatchdog, Patently-O, EFF Deeplinks, or JD Supra discussing XR Communications v. Samsung (W.D. Tex. No. 6:21-cv-00626). Every hit returned was a primary-source document or a docket aggregator rather than journalism: the complaint and claim-construction filings via RPX Insight and PTAB exhibit repositories; the civil docket via Justia, UniCourt, and the Unified Patents litigation portal; and IPR papers via Docket Alarm and Patexia. Because I could not retrieve any article, I am not characterizing what any outlet "reported," and I am not supplying any damages figure, settlement number, or market-impact estimate — none appears in the public record I could reach, and the § 317 settlement agreements in IPR2022-00613 were expressly kept confidential by the Board's July 6, 2023 termination order (Docket Alarm copy of Paper 34).

The closest thing to secondary coverage is campaign-adjacent rather than case-specific. A PatSnap litigation blog post analyzes XR's parallel suit against Amazon/eero (No. 6:21-cv-00619) and frames the Vivato portfolio as an enforcement program against mesh Wi-Fi and MU-MIMO products, noting that XR asserted the same two patents — US 10,594,376 and US 10,715,235 — there as against Samsung; it offers strategic commentary (e.g., that W.D. Tex. before Judge Albright remains a plaintiff-friendly venue and that the patents are a "credible enforcement tool" against Wi-Fi 6/6E products) but does not discuss the Samsung docket, its consolidation, or its dismissal, and its assertions are the blog's own analytical take rather than reporting on court events. On the corporate-disclosure side, Samsung's own SEC filings are the only party statements I located in this campaign context: Ubiquiti's 10-Q discloses the separate 2017 Vivato suit and states it "plans to vigorously defend itself" and "cannot currently estimate the possible loss or range of losses" — language that speaks to the campaign's litigation posture but is not about Samsung and is not press coverage. A Korean trade/investment database entry surfaced at KOTRA (posted 2024-07-26) records that XR filed against Microsoft (No. 6:23-cv-00124, US 10,715,235) and "at a similar time" against Samsung — a database record, not journalism. The only editorial-adjacent venue that engaged the '376 patent's PTAB history was the PTAB Litigation Blog, which hosts the Board's May 6, 2024 IPR2024-00148 decision rejecting Ubiquiti's untimely joinder bid; I could only confirm the document is hosted there for practitioner use and cannot confirm accompanying commentary on the Samsung case, so I flag that as unverified.

Why the silence is itself the finding — and where the gap may be. The absence of coverage is consistent with the docket: the case was voluntarily narrowed within weeks of filing, stayed pending IPR, and then dismissed on a joint motion in June 2023 with no Markman ruling, no summary-judgment decision, no trial, and no publicly disclosed payment — the profile of a settlement that generates a two-paragraph trade brief at most, not sustained reporting. My searches did not reach paywalled Law360 or Bloomberg Law archives, so I cannot rule out that those outlets covered the June 2021 filing wave (XR filed roughly ten complaints that day, which is the kind of event that generally draws a docket roundup) or the October 20, 2022 institution of IPR2022-00613; I simply could not surface such articles through open web search, and readers should treat "no coverage" as "none found," not "none exists." Note also one point of tension with the existing sections that a reporter would likely have seized on: the Korean database entry and RPX document trail confirm the asserted patent set in this family included US 10,594,376 and US 10,715,235, and XR's opening claim-construction brief in the related campaign referenced four asserted patents ('939, '376, '235, and '728) — the "four asserted patents" framing in that brief's background section belongs to a different member case, not to 6:21-cv-00626, and should not be imported into this case's press narrative.

Sources

• UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE
• UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE WESTERN DISTRICT OF TEXAS WACO DIVISION
• Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. v. XR COMMUNICATIONS, LLC D/B/A VIVATO TECH
• XR Communications LLC v. Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. et al - This case was last updated from U
• Search court records on patent:(10594376)
• 6:21-cv-00626 - XR Communications LLC Doing Business AS Vivato Technologies v. Samsung Electronics Co Ltd et al. - CIVIL DOCKET
• UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE
• Cisco Systems, Inc
• UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE WESTERN DISTRICT OF TEXAS WACO DIVISION
• IN THE UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE BEFORE THE PATENT TRIAL AND APPEAL BOARD
• Complaint analysis | 6:21-cv-00626 | XR Communications LLC v. Samsung Electronics Co Ltd | Ex Parte
• UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE

I'll research the counsel of record for XR Communications in this W.D. Tex. case.

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

Counsel of Record for Samsung — 6:21-cv-00626-ADA (W.D. Tex.)

Samsung used the standard two-tier structure in Judge Albright's court: Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer LLP as national/first-chair patent counsel, with Gillam & Smith, LLP (Marshall, TX) as local counsel. Both defendants — Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. and Samsung Electronics America, Inc. — were represented jointly by the same team.

Sourcing and docket anchors

• Dkt. 11 (7/2/2021) — Unopposed Motion for Extension of Time and Waiver of Foreign Service, filed by M. Smith for both Samsung entities; Dkt. 12 (7/2/2021) — Notice of Attorney Appearance by Melissa Richards Smith. Justia docket; Unified Patents docket
• Text Order (7/13/2021) granting the extension to 9/13/2021 and deeming service on Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. waived.
• 9/9/2021 — Notice of Attorney Appearance by Jin-Suk Park; same day, Samsung's Joint Motion to Dismiss the induced/contributory infringement allegations and the enhanced-damages and permanent-injunction requests (granted 9/13/2021, answer reset to 10/4/2021).
• Dkt. 9 (3/3/2023) — Order consolidating 6:21-cv-00626 (lead) with 6:23-cv-00125 (member), all future filings in the lead case; Jin-Suk Park Notice of Appearance, 3/14/2023 (Dkt. 11 in 6:23-cv-00125, CourtListener); Dkt. 12 joint motion to dismiss (6/1/2023); Dkt. 13 order granting dismissal and closing (6/8/2023).
• Park's firm affiliation and PTAB role: Samsung power of attorney in IPR2023-01025 (Jessica Kaiser lead; Jin-Suk Park and Christopher Marando back-up, Arnold & Porter) — PTAB document; Arnold & Porter bio; Chambers profile.
• A&P's IPR-side identification as "Attorneys for Petitioners Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., Samsung Electronics America, Inc., Google LLC, Cisco Systems" appears in XR's PTAB mandatory notices (Apr. 6, 2022) and in XR's certificates of service (Jan. 25, 2023), both of which list Sklenar, Margulies and Sharifahmadian at Arnold & Porter's D.C. office.

Caveats / gaps

• No in-house counsel (e.g., Samsung Legal) appears on the docket in either case; Jin-Suk Park is outside counsel at Arnold & Porter despite the frequency with which his appearances are attributed to "Samsung."
• I could not retrieve signature blocks or pro hac vice orders confirming which individual A&P attorneys formally entered in 6:21-cv-00626. Sklenar, Margulies and Sharifahmadian are firmly documented as Samsung's counsel in the related IPRs (IPR2022-00613, IPR2022-01362, and the later '235/'376 proceedings) and as A&P's Samsung relationship team, but I am not asserting they filed appearances in the district court case.
• Docket numbering is easy to confuse across the two consolidated cases: the 2021 lead case carries Docs. 1–13 (2021 filings) while the 2023 member case, 6:23-cv-00125, carries its own Docs. 1–13 (Feb.–June 2023). The Park appearance and the dismissal papers commonly cited as "Dkt. 11–13" are in the 2023 member case.
• Third-party trackers report the lead case as "closed" on either 5/22/2023 or 6/8/2023 (Ex Parte); the docketed closing order I could verify is Dkt. 13 (6/8/2023). Treat the 5/22/2023 date as unverified.
• Filings were not sealed in any way that obscured defense counsel; the appearance record is public and complete as to the two firms above. The only sealed/unavailable items I encountered were internal PTAB exhibits, not district-court appearances.