Shortly after electronic trading major GAIN Capital, which is now part of StoneX Group, requested that the Court provide some clarity on how the patent infringement lawsuit brought by OANDA should proceed, the Court has responded to GAIN’s letter.

An order by the Court approves all of GAIN’s requests, including setting the deadlines GAIN sought to respond to OANDA’s amended complaint (if OANDA does amend its complaint). This way, the Court removed the confusion created by OANDA’s lack of determination on whether it would or not amend its original complaint, thereby leaving GAIN in the dark on when and how to respond.

The latest Court document, seen by FX News Group, allows GAIN to answer or otherwise move in response to any amended Complaint filed by plaintiff OANDA within 14 days subsequent to OANDA filing its amended Complaint, or alternatively the deadline for OANDA to do so of June 1, 2021 has elapsed.

Importantly, the date for commencement of any discovery proceedings is adjourned until further Order of the Court.

Technically, this order means that GAIN gets more time to prepare its response in this legal battle with OANDA. Also, GAIN would avoid the absurd situation where it would have had to respond to a complaint it had not seen.

In this lawsuit, OANDA alleges that GAIN infringes two patents, U.S. Patent Nos. 7,146,336 (“the ’366 patent”) and 8,392,311 (“the ’311 patent”).

On March 30, 2021, the Court found that OANDA’s Complaint is deficient in identifying how GAIN’s product (that is, forex.com) allegedly infringes each claim of the patents.

OANDA asserted it had provided claim charts with screenshots from www.forex.com to demonstrate how the website, the accused product, infringes. OANDA insists it should not be required to identify how GAIN’s non-public backend functionalities work. OANDA suggested the screenshots may give rise to a plausible inference that GAIN’s trading platform contains certain backend functionalities.

The Court found OANDA’s Complaint was deficient, as some of the screenshots in the Complaint fail to clarify how each element of the claim corresponds to the component(s) in the screenshots. The Complaint did not cure this deficiency with supplementary explanations, the Court said. Such a deficiency existed in the screenshots for a number of patent claims.

As a result, the Court trimmed some of the claims in OANDA’s complaint and allowed OANDA to file an amended complaint within 60 days after the order was issued.