Two years after Brumfield v. IBG LLC extended WesternGeco’s extraterritoriality framework to § 271(a) and reasonable-royalty damages, a recent District of Delaware decision shows that the issue remains active. In Corteva Agriscience LLC v. Inari Agriculture, Inc., the court rejected an effort to confine damages to the immediate domestic acts of infringement and partially excluded a damages expert for taking too restrictive a view of WesternGeco and Brumfield. 2026 WL 2644045, No. 1:23-cv-01059, D.I. 648 (D. Del. Sept. 8, 2026).
Corteva alleged that Inari wrongfully used Corteva’s patented seed technology to accelerate its entry into the market. Corteva asserted, among other claims, direct, contributory, and induced infringement of U.S. Patent No. 8,575,434 which concerns corn seeds, plants, and tissues containing a genetic event that confers insect resistance. Corteva alleged that Inari obtained patented seeds from a public depository, transferred them outside the United States, and used them to develop its own seed varieties. Both parties filed Daubert motions directed to their respective patent-damages experts.
Inari’s Challenge to Corteva’s Damages Expert, Dr. Vellturo
Dr. Vellturo opined that the parties would have negotiated a substantial lump-sum reasonable royalty in May 2020. His analysis considered the value to Inari of accelerating development and commercialization of products derived from Corteva’s patented technology, as well as the expected competitive harm to Corteva. Among other things, he relied on Inari’s own internal projections from 2022-2023 and applied the Georgia-Pacific factors.
Inari argued that Dr. Vellturo’s opinion should be precluded because the alleged growing, editing, copying and development activities occurred abroad, and because Dr. Vellturo relied on projections prepared after the hypothetical negotiation. The Court rejected both arguments. First, the Court found Inari’s premise that foreign use of a patented invention cannot give rise to damages under § 284 was no longer tenable after WesternGeco LLC v. ION Geophysical Corp., 585 U.S. 407 (2018). Following the Federal Circuit’s decision in Brumfield v. IBG LLC, 97 F.4th 854 (Fed. Cir. 2024), the Court noted that “the analysis must start from an act of infringement (cognizable under § 271) and then make a causal connection to the harm experienced, even if quantifying the harm sweeps in foreign conduct.” Id. at *3. Whether Dr. Vellturo successfully established that connection, on the record presented, was a question for the jury rather than a basis for exclusion.
The court also rejected Inari’s challenge to Dr. Vellturo’s use of Inari’s 2022 and 2023 projections, even though those projections were post-hypothetical negotiation and the projected sales ultimately did not occur. The Court noted that “evidence from after the hypothetical negotiation can be insightful, so long as it is not treated as limiting or a substitute for the required hypothetical negotiation analysis.” Id. at *4 (citing Aqua Shield v. Inter Pool Cover Team, 774 F.3d 766, 770 (Fed. Cir. 2014). The fact that the projections were Inari’s own, coupled with other evidence supporting their reliability, further supported admissibility. The court therefore denied Inari’s motion to exclude Dr. Vellturo’s patent-damages opinions.
Corteva’s Challenge to Inari’s Damages Expert, Dr. Goodwin
Corteva, in turn, moved to exclude portions of the rebuttal opinions of Inari’s damages expert, Dr. Goodwin, who criticized Dr. Vellturo’s analysis on several grounds, including hindsight, economic feasibility, the structure of the hypothetical negotiation, and the treatment of financial data.
The court declined to exclude Dr. Goodwin merely because he did not offer his own reasonable-royalty calculation. As a rebuttal expert, Dr. Goodwin was permitted to offer selected critiques of Dr. Vellturo without independently performing every step necessary to reach an affirmative royalty opinion. Id. at *5.
But the court drew the line where Goodwin’s criticisms rested on an incorrect legal premise. For example, Dr. Goodwin stated that “Inari’s long-term commercial outcomes, such as its foreign development work or projected U.S. or foreign sales years later (including between 2024 and 2032), occur well outside the temporal and geographic boundaries that I understand WesternGeco and related authority permit” and that “[t]he appropriate measure of damages would therefore be limited to the tangible, realized cost savings, if any, directly attributable to Inari’s accused testing and export activity, rather than the speculative value of its future sales.” Id. The Court characterized that position as “a sweeping and incorrect judgment of how the law works.” Id. In the Court’s view, Dr. Goodwin’s reading of WesternGeco and Brumfield effectively treated damages tied to Inari’s export activity as categorically unavailable, which was incorrect. The Court therefore granted Corteva’s motion to the extent Dr. Goodwin offered an incorrect statement of law or opinions flowing from that incorrect premise.
Conclusion
The decision reinforces that patent damages law does not impose a geographic cutoff on damages simply because part of the resulting economic activity occurs abroad. Instead, Courts may permit damages theories that account for foreign conduct where the claimed harm is sufficiently tied to a domestic act of infringement, while excluding expert opinions that treat such downstream consequences as categorically unavailable.