[00:00:38] Speaker 02:
Our last case this morning is Keith Ranieri versus Microsoft and AT&T, 2016, 1698 and 99.

[00:00:49] Speaker 02:
Mr. Crocker.

[00:00:52] Speaker 01:
Good morning, Your Honors, members of the panel, and if it may please the Court, I'd like to focus my arguments this morning on the standing issue

[00:01:03] Speaker 01:
I'm perfectly capable of addressing any comments or questions the court may have about the abuse of discretion, the discovery, and the contempt issues.

[00:01:13] Speaker 01:
The state?

[00:01:15] Speaker 03:
Good.

[00:01:15] Speaker 04:
Good.

[00:01:16] Speaker 04:
At page 18 in your blue brief, you say at the bottom of that page, at the dismissal hearing, and as a surprise, the district court called upon Rainier to testify and then made findings of his dishonesty.

[00:01:33] Speaker 04:
and that Rainier had violated several orders and was contemplations.

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And in footnote nine, you say more precisely, the district court ordered that if Rainier wanted to offer documents to oppose the motion to dismiss, he had to authenticate them in person.

[00:01:51] Speaker 04:
He appeared at the hearing to do so.

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But the defendants then stipulated authenticity, whereupon the district court asked Rainier to testify generally.

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And you cite to the appendix.

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So, I'm looking at it, and it appears to me that what actually happened was that you arrived at the hearing with a set of exhibits entitled Plaintiffs Duplicate Exhibits to be Offered during Rainier's examination, March 1st, 2016.

[00:02:23] Speaker 04:
That's at 2664.

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The district court judge remarks, you were very optimistic.

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And that you already had this prepared, assuming I was going to grant your request to examine Mr. Renier.

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That's at 2664 to 65.

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You requested that Mr. Renier be allowed to testify when you stated at 2661.

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I would submit, Your Honor, that I have Mr. Renier

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here ready to and the court interrupts and says let me ask a couple of questions and then the court allowed Mr. Rainier's testimony directly over the objection of the appellees at 2660 to 63.

[00:03:24] Speaker 04:
In light of what I just read you, how do you justify the statement

[00:03:29] Speaker 04:
and the footnote in the blue brief.

[00:03:31] Speaker 01:
The exhibits that were prepared and presented to the court were the ones that the court requested authentication of.

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In other words, a lot happened before we got there.

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All the court was willing to permit him to do, pursuant to prior court order, was permit him to come and authenticate documents.

[00:03:50] Speaker 01:
So the set of exhibits were the documents that were requested to be authenticated.

[00:03:56] Speaker 01:
You are correct, that Your Honor is correct, that at that point in time, the court encouraged the parties to stipulate to authenticity.

[00:04:09] Speaker 01:
They did.

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And further, at that point in time, I then made a decision to request the court to permit Mr. Ranieri to testify as to those documents.

[00:04:21] Speaker 01:
I put him up.

[00:04:22] Speaker 02:
But the district court didn't believe any of his testimony, and it noted that all the documents purporting to give him standing and ownership or entitlement to speak for the corporation were missing.

[00:04:38] Speaker 01:
Correct.

[00:04:39] Speaker 02:
That led to the finding of lack of standing, lack of documents, and lack of credibility.

[00:04:45] Speaker 01:
That's all correct.

[00:04:47] Speaker 02:
And so what's your argument?

[00:04:48] Speaker 01:
The argument is that

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One cannot defeat standing on the basis of irrelevant collateral information in an irrelevant collateral attack.

[00:04:58] Speaker 02:
Doesn't standing have to be positively shown?

[00:05:02] Speaker 01:
That is correct.

[00:05:04] Speaker 01:
But the standing that was positively shown was on the basis of the assignment document, which is facially valid.

[00:05:10] Speaker 01:
Facially valid, there is nothing wrong with the face of the assignment itself.

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It was executed by Mr. Ranieri.

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He owned the corporation.

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whether he owns 70% or 100%, he owned the corporation.

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So the question thus becomes, the fundamental question is whether the district court was justified in conducting a thorough collateral attack or permitting a thorough collateral attack on the corporate documents that led up to the assignment.

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In other words, Mr. Ranieri had

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difficulty recalling the circumstances of the assignment or the corporate actions leading up to the assignment.

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He formed the corporation.

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He was the driving force behind it.

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He paid for it with the funds that were subject to his direction.

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He did everything.

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He was the inventor.

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He did everything to bring about the

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the prosecution of the patent and to pursue it.

[00:06:17] Speaker 04:
The court had the opportunity to observe the demeanor of the witness and to determine, based on that observation, the credibility of the witness.

[00:06:29] Speaker 04:
And the court found that Mr. Bernieri was dishonest.

[00:06:35] Speaker 01:
Correct.

[00:06:37] Speaker 01:
But the credibility issue was on a collateral matter that was irrelevant to the action, irrelevant to the standing issue.

[00:06:45] Speaker 04:
Isn't there a doctrine of Jesus that's been 45 years or so, I don't know, a long time since law school, falso in unis, falsus in omnia?

[00:06:55] Speaker 01:
Correct.

[00:06:56] Speaker 01:
But in this case, as we cite in our reply brief,

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tautology should not be applied here because the credibility determination was obtained as a means to shield the court from appellate review on the important issues of the actual patent itself.

[00:07:21] Speaker 04:
And the credibility.

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If counsel makes a misrepresentation to me in a break, don't I have the ability to just say, well,

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Nothing in here is true?

[00:07:34] Speaker 01:
Your Honor, you do.

[00:07:36] Speaker 01:
However, in this case, the misrepresentation attributed to Mr. Ranieri was on a wholly collateral matter.

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If this court were to permit a collateral challenge to assignment documents, to documents of title, then it would be, well,

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To give you your honor an example, in state title cases involving real property, one can imagine the havoc that would occur if a title insurance company were to issue a policy of title insurance on a real estate.

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And somebody said, well, the corporate authorizations leading up to the grant deed were insufficient and inadequate.

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So the court was focusing its,

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its examination on those collateral corporate matters, on what happened to lead to the resolution assigning the property, assigning the interest to Mr. Ranieri.

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That's what the court focused on.

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But they were irrelevant.

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So it would be an abuse of discretion, and it would be a matter of an error of law, really, to focus upon

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the credibility determination that was made on matters that should never have been before the court in the first place.

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So I would urge the court, under the thinking of this court's Gaia decision and the Fifth Circuit's Renagle decision, to not permit this court's decision to turn upon collateral matters.

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And when Mr. Ranieri was offered up to testify at trial, he was there only because the court told him the only thing he could do was to authenticate documents.

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He couldn't submit a declaration.

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He couldn't submit the declarations of any other person.

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That's all he was permitted to do.

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And so when we get there and the court permits the admissibility of the documents, well,

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We could tell the court wanted him to testify, and we put him up.

[00:09:54] Speaker 01:
And that is accurate.

[00:09:55] Speaker 01:
And if the brief is inaccurate on that part, you have my apologies, Your Honor.

[00:10:00] Speaker 03:
Well, is it not inaccurate?

[00:10:02] Speaker 01:
It is not inaccurate.

[00:10:05] Speaker 01:
The brief is not inaccurate?

[00:10:07] Speaker 01:
No.

[00:10:07] Speaker 01:
Your Honor's recitation of the facts are accurate.

[00:10:12] Speaker 01:
And if my brief on that point is inaccurate,

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I'm not saying if.

[00:10:17] Speaker 03:
I don't want an if.

[00:10:18] Speaker 03:
It is inaccurate.

[00:10:20] Speaker 01:
And that being the case, Your Honor, I would urge the Court to look at the realities of the standing issues.

[00:10:32] Speaker 01:
And that is, one cannot attack standing on a titular document

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by unraveling or challenging the shareholder relationships.

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And that was all he was examined on.

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He wasn't examined on any other point.

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And so I would, to the extent that that is a concern to the court, and it is, I would urge the court not to use that particular issue against my client, since it's an irrelevant issue.

[00:11:05] Speaker 01:
I'd like to reserve, if I might.

[00:11:08] Speaker 02:
We will do that.

[00:11:10] Speaker 02:
Mr. Trela.

[00:11:15] Speaker 00:
Thank you, Your Honor.

[00:11:16] Speaker 00:
May it please the Court, there is nothing collateral at all about what happened in the district court.

[00:11:23] Speaker 00:
If the view of the law that you just heard were right, nothing would stop me from throwing together a set of documents that says, I own a controlling interest in Apple.

[00:11:33] Speaker 00:
I hereby name myself chairman.

[00:11:35] Speaker 04:
Yes, it would.

[00:11:36] Speaker 04:
You're a member of the bar, and you're bound by ethical standards.

[00:11:39] Speaker 00:
Well, let's put that to one side.

[00:11:41] Speaker 00:
Let's assume that I wasn't found.

[00:11:43] Speaker 00:
I elect myself chairman, and I hereby assign all of Apple's patents to me.

[00:11:46] Speaker 00:
That's what Ranieri did here.

[00:11:48] Speaker 00:
Now, he did it for GTI and not Apple, so it was less transparently ridiculous.

[00:11:52] Speaker 00:
But it was no more legitimate than if I had done it for myself or Apple.

[00:11:57] Speaker 00:
Now, this wasn't lost on Judge Lynn.

[00:11:59] Speaker 00:
She said, and this is a 2768 of the appendix,

[00:12:03] Speaker 00:
So all of a sudden, Mr. Ranieri surfaces, says he stole stockholder, assigns everything to himself.

[00:12:09] Speaker 00:
Are you telling me the court is just stuck, that nobody can evaluate whether that's true because he has a document that looks like an assignment?

[00:12:15] Speaker 00:
Well, counsel, of course, said no.

[00:12:17] Speaker 00:
He had to say no.

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And he went on to wholeheartedly agree that the question whether Ranieri actually owned GTI stock was a proper area of inquiry for the court.

[00:12:27] Speaker 00:
In fact, he told Judge Lynn that her question is, quote, so on point and gets to the heart of the issue.

[00:12:32] Speaker 00:
Well, of course it did.

[00:12:34] Speaker 00:
A couple of weeks before in a brief he filed in January, this is at Appendix 1609, he said, this is a quote, if he, that is, Raniere, didn't own GTI, he couldn't transfer himself the patents in suit.

[00:12:45] Speaker 00:
Well, of course he couldn't.

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So that was the core issue.

[00:12:48] Speaker 00:
It's not collateral.

[00:12:50] Speaker 00:
It goes to the heart of whether there is a facially valid assignment, whatever that means.

[00:12:55] Speaker 00:
It can't mean a piece of paper that somebody just writes up and says he owns everything.

[00:13:00] Speaker 00:
Then, facially valid has no meaning at all.

[00:13:04] Speaker 04:
When Judge Lynn... Well, yeah.

[00:13:08] Speaker 00:
There are a whole bunch of issues that would arise that we don't even need to get into.

[00:13:13] Speaker 00:
And the other thing is here, there's a suggestion in the brief, certainly, and I think Mr. Crockett suggested it here, too, that Judge Lynn was getting tangled up in corporate formalities and that sort of thing.

[00:13:27] Speaker 00:
She didn't require that there be transfers in writing, even though the GTI bylaws required it.

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But she did comment that, well, it seems sort of odd that there are all these things that are supposed to be done in writing.

[00:13:40] Speaker 00:
There are no documents that support any of it.

[00:13:43] Speaker 00:
The only documents that do show up here say that he was not a shareholder and contradict his story.

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And she actually asked counsel, doesn't this go to credibility?

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And he wholeheartedly agreed.

[00:13:57] Speaker 00:
Well, yes, it does go to credibility.

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And that's a very important problem for the court, especially today.

[00:14:02] Speaker 00:
That's what he said.

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And so again, I don't want to beat a dead horse, but as I said, there's nothing collateral here.

[00:14:09] Speaker 00:
This went to the core of whether there was any assignment here.

[00:14:12] Speaker 00:
The judge found on a compelling record that he had not established ownership of a single share of GTI stock.

[00:14:20] Speaker 00:
So the documents he executed in December were false.

[00:14:23] Speaker 00:
They actually were knowingly false.

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So her finding of contumacious conduct and perjury was entirely justified, as was the dismissal.

[00:14:32] Speaker 00:
I don't want to take any more time at this point in the morning if the court doesn't have any questions.

[00:14:39] Speaker 00:
Thank you, Your Honors.

[00:14:41] Speaker 02:
Thank you, Mr. Trellon.

[00:14:42] Speaker 02:
Mr. Crockett has almost five minutes if he needs you.

[00:14:45] Speaker 01:
Thank you, Your Honor.

[00:14:48] Speaker 01:
This wasn't a stranger to the corporation.

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This was the former, the person who formed the corporation.

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Most of the documents of formation require his signature, require his approval.

[00:15:01] Speaker 01:
He was the primary inventor.

[00:15:04] Speaker 01:
He had the technical capacity and ability to create this patent.

[00:15:10] Speaker 01:
He was not a complete stranger who suddenly shows up and says, I've got an assignment of all of Ford's interests in this particular corporation.

[00:15:18] Speaker 01:
This person, Mr. Ranieri, had all the indicia necessary for Tyler.

[00:15:24] Speaker 01:
And when the court looks at the Renagle decision, which

[00:15:30] Speaker 01:
Defendants really get wrong in their brief, and they miscite it very improperly.

[00:15:36] Speaker 01:
But when you look at the Renagle decision, in the Renagle decision, a series of mortgages were assigned to Deutsche Bank.

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And in one assignment, a contractor lied and said, I'm the vice president of Deutsche Bank, and I make this assignment to Deutsche Bank.

[00:15:58] Speaker 01:
And the bar were about to challenge that and said, that's a lie.

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And that's a forgery.

[00:16:07] Speaker 01:
And there are difficulties with the acknowledgment, the notarization here, because this document was not signed.

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It was scanned.

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It was robo-signed.

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And the notarization is false.

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And the court said, notwithstanding that lie,

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And notwithstanding the lie on the acknowledgment, that sort of relationship between Asenor and Assenee cannot be unwound by the borrower.

[00:16:39] Speaker 01:
That's a matter that's wholly irrelevant, and the plaintiff has lacked standing to make that argument.

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And that's the kind of argument that is being made here by the defendants.

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Now it's not technically a standing argument, it's a relevance argument because they're defendants, they're not plaintiffs.

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And in none of their cases do they cite any decision which permits this kind of collateral attack on the face of the assignment.

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notwithstanding Mr. Ranieri supposedly lying on the stand about the 100% ownership versus 70% ownership of the corporation.

[00:17:22] Speaker 01:
That's all that he was really found in difficulty of.

[00:17:26] Speaker 01:
The district court had problems with him asserting that he had 100% when he really had 70%.

[00:17:34] Speaker 04:
No, that's not the way that the district court put it.

[00:17:37] Speaker 04:
He was a liar.

[00:17:38] Speaker 01:
That's true.

[00:17:39] Speaker 01:
That's what he said.

[00:17:40] Speaker 01:
That's what she said.

[00:17:43] Speaker 04:
It's not that she had problems with 70 versus 100.

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It was that he was a liar on the stand, and she refused to accept the veracity of his testimony.

[00:17:53] Speaker 01:
Yes, that is correct.

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That was a finding.

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That is correct.

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And the lie pertained to the corporate resolution that was executed in 2014 that said, I own 1% of GTI.

[00:18:05] Speaker 01:
when in fact he owned only 75% beneficial to his girlfriend.

[00:18:12] Speaker 01:
But he explains in the transcript that the reason why I signed that is because the persons who owned the other 25%, they prepared this document for me to sign.

[00:18:24] Speaker 01:
So I didn't consider it a lie.

[00:18:26] Speaker 01:
I said, hey, if they want me to sign this document saying that I own 100% and it's against their interest, I will sign that document.

[00:18:34] Speaker 01:
That was his explanation.

[00:18:36] Speaker 01:
And that's not... And it was unbelievable, according to the court.

[00:18:41] Speaker 01:
That's what the court said.

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And I would urge this court not to defer to that determination, because it was on a collateral matter that should never have been considered by this court, by that court.

[00:18:58] Speaker 02:
Thank you, Mr. Crockett.

[00:18:59] Speaker 02:
We'll take the case under advisement.

[00:19:04] Speaker ?:
All rise.