On February 11, 2026, District Judge Lewis J. Liman (S.D.N.Y.) denied a motion for reconsideration of portions of the Court’s claim construction order defining terms in accordance with their plain and ordinary meaning, filed by Defendants Qingdao Network Technology Co., Ltd., d/b/a UCoolMe and Vivicute Limited (“Defendants”). Lashify, Inc. v. Qingdao Network Tech. Co., Ltd., No. 25-cv-4183 (S.D.N.Y. Feb. 11, 2026). Specifically, Defendants requested reconstruction of “designed to attach” based on the file history of a related patent and the terms “base” and “knotless base” because of specification disclaimer.
Judge Liman rejected both requests. Motions for reconsideration, he explained, are subject to a high standard and should be granted “only when the moving party ‘identifies an intervening change of controlling law, the availability of new evidence, or the need to correct a clear error or prevent manifest injustice.’” Id. at *2 (citation omitted).
Here, Judge Liman noted that Defendants previously referenced the pertinent file history during the claim construction hearing, but the Court declined to consider it because Defendants failed to mention it in their claim construction briefs or to enter it into evidence and, thus, waived any argument based on it. Because it existed, the file history does not qualify as “truly newly discovered” and its exclusion “does not establish clear error or manifest injustice.” Id. at *2–3.
Next, Judge Liman denied Defendants’ request to reconstrue the terms “base” and “knotless base” as something that does not use a string or thread. The Court reiterated that Defendants failed to show any “clear and unmistakable” evidence of disclaimer in the specification, finding the statement “that the claimed invention provides an advantage over conventional clusters’ use of string at the base” insufficient for disavowal of the use of string to connect lashes. Id. at *5. The Court also found that the specification’s mention of disadvantages of the use of string in conventional clusters do not go toward a key feature of the claimed invention, and that claim differentiation further instructs against disclaimer here. Id. at *6–7.
Previous blogs on this case may be found here and here.
