Bifurcation Refused Where Magnitude Of Savings Not Proven

The Federal Court refused bifurcation of a patent proceeding into liability and quantification stages.

The defendant, British Columbia, moved for bifurcation asserting the case was complex given the number of patent claims at issue and the architecture of the alleged infringing system. The defendant pointed to several alleged temporal and substantive infringement issues and asserted bifurcation would save time and costs for the parties and the Court.

The motions judge held it was "impossible to fathom from the [defendant's] record the magnitude of the potential savings" of time and expense by bifurcation. She dismissed the motion as the defendant had "not come close" to meeting the threshold of satisfying the Court the savings were enough to "outweigh the inherent inefficiencies of bifurcation."