Federal Circuit Reverses District Court's Rule 703 Ruling

Federal Rule of Evidence 703 provides that

An expert may base an opinion on facts or data in the case that the expert has been made aware of or personally observed. If experts in the particular field would reasonably rely on those kinds of facts or data in forming an opinion on the subject, they need not be admissible for the opinion to be admitted. But if the facts or data would otherwise be inadmissible, the proponent of the opinion may disclose them to the jury only if their probative value in helping the jury evaluate the opinion substantially outweighs their prejudicial effect.

It's rare to see a ruling reversed based on a judge misapplying Rule 703, but an example can be found with the recent opinion of the Federal Circuit in ParkerVision, Inc. v. Qualcomm Incorporated, 2024 WL 4094640 (Fed. Cir. 2024).

In ParkerVision, a patentee sued its competitor, alleging infringement of patents related to wireless communications technology. During litigation, the district judge granted Qualcomm's Daubert motions, excluding testimony from patentee's validity and infringement experts.

On appeal, the Federal Circuit reversed, found that

To be admissible, “proposed expert testimony must be supported by appropriate validation – i.e., good grounds, based on what is known.”...Instead, “experts can base their opinion on facts or data in the case ‘that the expert has been made aware of.’”...Moreover, “[a]s a general rule,” in the Eleventh Circuit “questions relating to the bases and sources of an expert's opinion affect the weight to be assigned that opinion rather than its admissibility and should be left for the jury's consideration.”...

Here, it is undisputed that the materials considered by ParkerVision's experts included schematics and technical documents, which, as Qualcomm conceded, are the “type of documents...that experts in the field would reasonably consider in evaluating the operation of a circuit.”...Relatedly, we have observed that “reliance on scientific test results prepared by others may constitute the type of evidence that is reasonably relied upon by experts.”...There is, then, neither a factual nor legal basis here for finding that expert testimony is unreliable unless the expert herself undertakes to test or simulate the accused products. Indeed, even Qualcomm's senior director of engineering agreed that, in this case, one could “come to an accurate understanding as to how one of the accused products works without the need to do an independent simulation,” as long as one looked “solely at the simulation results that are contained in the design reviews.”...ParkerVision's experts did precisely what this Qualcomm witness testified would be sufficient....

The district court's finding that testing and simulations were critical for the experts’ testimony to be reliable appears to have been based on scientific literature to the effect that “‘simulation is necessary to accurately predict detailed circuit behavior.’”...The district court also seemed to think that ParkerVision had admitted that tests and simulations were absolutely necessary....The district court committed clear error in reading the literature's general statements, and ParkerVision's lawyers’ arguments for discovery from Qualcomm, as establishing a prerequisite for a reliable infringement opinion in the specific context of this case. While Qualcomm's attacks on ParkerVision's experts may well persuade a jury not to credit the experts’ infringement opinions, the district court should have left it to jurors to “evaluate the correctness of facts underlying an expert's testimony.”...

Thus, we conclude that the district court abused its discretion by excluding the testimony of ParkerVision's infringement experts. We reverse the grant of Qualcomm's Daubert motions. We likewise vacate the district court's grant of summary judgment of non-infringement of the transmitter claims of the ’940 patent, which was based on the exclusion of ParkerVision's infringement experts.

-CM