Chicago IP Attorney & Lawyer : R. David Donoghue : Chicago IP Litigation Blog

MPC Containment Sys., Ltd. v. Moreland, No. 05 C 6973, 2008 WL 1775501 (N.D. Ill. Apr. 17, 2008) (Aspen, J.).*

Judge Aspen granted in part plaintiff MPC Containment's ("MPC") Fed. R. Civ. P. 12(f) motion to strike defendants' (collectively "Moreland") waiver and unclean hands defenses. The Court struck Moreland's unclean hands defense. Moreland alleged unclean hands based upon MPC’s allegedly fraudulent procurement of a patent related to the flexible tank technology at issue. But the Court held that Moreland failed to show that MPC's alleged fraud was somehow directed at Moreland. Furthermore, while the patented technology is related to the technology in suit, MPC's alleged misconduct in obtaining the patent had no connection to this suit.

The Court, however, allowed Moreland’s waiver defense. Moreland did not specifically plead that MPC voluntarily relinquished its rights to the claims in suit. But it was sufficient that voluntary relinquishment could be inferred from the pleadings.

*  Click here for more on this case in the Blog's archives.

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MPC Containment Sys., Ltd. v. Moreland, No. 05 C 6973, 2006 WL 2331148 (N.D. Ill. Aug. 10, 2006) (Aspen, J.).

Judge Aspen granted defendants’ Rule 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss plaintiff’s Lanham Act unfair competition claim for failure to meet the Rule 9(b) heightened pleading requirements.  Plaintiff’s bare allegation that the individual defendants made misrepresentations to a single customer did not satisfy Rule 9(b)’s heightened pleading requirements. 

Plaintiff failed to allege when the misrepresentations were made, alleging only that they were made during the individual defendants’s employment with plaintiff, a period of at least twenty years. The Court also held that plaintiff failed to allege that the communications were “commercial advertising or promotion,” as required by the Lanham Act § 43(a)(1)(B), because plaintiff never stated how the misrepresentations were communicated. Finally, the Court warned in a footnote that “allegations based ‘on information and belief’ generally do not satisfy the particularity requirements of Rule 9(b).”

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