Olivia Sophie Rafferty contributed to this article.
Context: In July 2025, NeoLayer LLC, a non-practicing entity, bought 101 display patents from Taiwan’s AUO. Then, in two separate actions, it sued Samsung Electronics and ASUS in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas on December 31, 2025, over six of those patents (case no. 2:25-cv-01259 and 2:25-cv-01260). In April, Judge Rodney Gilstrap, who was assigned the case, consolidated both suits. In June 2026, it filed a second Samsung suit over three further patents, and it also sued BOE over 10 patents. Samsung Display, a Samsung Electronics subsidiary, has reportedly been challenging the first five patents at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) through ex parte reexamination since August.
What’s new: ASUS and Samsung Electronics have filed a motion to dismiss the district court case for lack of standing (heavily redacted motion under box), alleging NeoLayer is a PAE, “not a patentee”, and has “suffered no injury the patent laws recognize”. Further, Samsung Display has filed another ex parte reexamination request against U.S. Patent No. 7,649,583 (“Semiconductor structure and fabricating method thereof for liquid crystal display device”), meaning all six patents from NeoLayer’s first Samsung complaint are now under challenge, with reexamination reportedly ordered for four of them.
Direct impact: A reexamination request does not pause the Texas case on its own. Samsung would have to persuade the court to grant a stay. If the USPTO narrows or cancels claims, NeoLayer’s first case against Samsung Electronics could shrink considerably, because those six patents are the entire basis of that complaint.
Wider ramifications: The case shows how defendants now respond to patent assertions at the USPTO. Since the agency expanded discretionary denials of inter partes review (IPR) petitions, reexamination requests have grown sharply and have outnumbered IPR petitions in recent quarters. NeoLayer also asserted overlapping patents against ASUS and BOE, so a successful challenge would help them as well.
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Court and counsel
United States: District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Judge Rodney Gilstrap; United States Patent and Trademark Office (reexaminations).
In the Eastern District of Texas, NeoLayer is being represented by AZA Law’s Warren Joseph McCarty, III, Chun Deng, Colin Phillips, Jason Scott McManis, Louis Liao, Sean Richard Keller, Thomas V. DelRosario, and Zachary Blaine Grinovich, as well as Miller Fair Henry’s Andrea Leigh Fair.
Meanwhile, Samsung Electronics is being represented by Fish & Richardson’s Jared Hartzman, Michael J. McKeon, and Steffen Lake, as well as Kane Russell Coleman Logan’s Jon Bentley Hyland and Gillam & Smith’s Melissa Richards Smith.