Rothschild Connected Devices Innovations, LLC v. Coca-Cola Company

NOTE: This disposition is nonprecedential.
United States Court of Appeals
for the Federal Circuit
______________________
ROTHSCHILD CONNECTED DEVICES
INNOVATIONS, LLC,
Plaintiff-Appellant
v.
COCA-COLA COMPANY,
Defendant-Appellee
______________________
2024-1253
______________________
Appeal from the United States District Court for the
Northern District of Georgia in No. 1:16-cv-01241-TWT,
Judge Thomas W. Thrash, Jr.
______________________
Decided: October 21, 2025
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JOHN C. CAREY, Carey Rodriguez Milian Gonya, LLP,
Miami, FL, argued for plaintiff-appellant.
PAUL WHITFIELD HUGHES, III, McDermott Will &
Schulte LLP, Washington, DC, argued for defendant-appel-
lee. Also represented by SARAH HOGARTH, CHARLES H.
SEIDELL; JODI BENASSI, San Francisco, CA; ALAN SHANE
NICHOLS, Atlanta, GA.
______________________
Case: 24-1253 Document: 61 Page: 1 Filed: 10/21/2025

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ROTHSCHILD CONNECTED DEVICES INNOVATIONS, LLC v.
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Before LOURIE, PROST, and STOLL, Circuit Judges.
PROST, Circuit Judge.
Rothschild Connected Devices Innovations, LLC
(“Rothschild”) sued Coca-Cola Co. (“Coca-Cola”) for infring-
ing U.S. Patent No. 8,417,377 (“the ’377 patent”). The U.S.
District Court for the Northern District of Georgia granted
summary judgment of noninfringement. Rothschild ap-
peals. We affirm.
I
Rothschild challenges the district court’s interpreta-
tion of claim 11 of the ’377 patent as requiring that certain
steps be performed in a particular order. Claim 11, which
is the only independent claim at issue, recites:
A beverage dispenser comprising:
at least one compartment containing an element of
a beverage;
at least one valve coupling the at least one com-
partment to a dispensing section configured to dis-
pense the beverage;
a mixing chamber for mixing the beverage;
a user interface module configured to receive an[]
identity of a user and an identifier of the beverage;
a communication module configured to transmit
the identity of the user and the identifier of the bev-
erage to a server over a network, receive user gener-
ated beverage product preferences based on the
identity of the user and the identifier of the beverage
from the server and communicat[e] the user gener-
ated beverage product preferences to controller; and
the controller coupled to the communication mod-
ule and configured to actuate the at least one valve
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to control an amount of the element to be dispensed
and to actuate the mixing chamber based on the
user gene[r]ated beverage product preferences.
’377 patent claim 11 (emphasis added).
At issue in this appeal is whether the claimed commu-
nication module must be configured to perform its steps in
the order in which they are written—namely: (1) “transmit
the identity of the user and the identifier of the beverage
to a server over a network”; (2) “receive user generated bev-
erage product preferences based on the identity of the user
and the identifier of the beverage from the server”; and
(3) “communicat[e] the user generated beverage product
preferences to controller.” Id.
The district court said yes—the communication module
must be configured to do these things in that particular or-
der. Rothschild Connected Devices Innovations, LLC v.
Coca-Cola Co., 688 F. Supp. 3d 1281, 1295–1300 (N.D. Ga.
2023). There is no dispute that, under this interpretation,
Coca-Cola does not literally infringe via its accused Free-
style dispensers. The district court therefore granted sum-
mary judgment of noninfringement. Id. at 1300.
Rothschild timely appealed. We have jurisdiction un-
der 28 U.S.C. § 1295(a)(1).
II
We agree that the claimed communication module
must be configured to perform its steps in the order in
which they are written. We therefore affirm the summary
judgment of noninfringement.1
1 Rothschild separately maintains that the district
court erred by not considering an alternative theory of in-
fringement that was premised on Coca-Cola’s Freestyle
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Although a particular order of method steps is typically
not required unless the steps actually recite one, “such a
result can ensue when the method steps implicitly require
that they be performed in the order written.” Altiris, Inc.
v. Symantec Corp., 318 F.3d 1363, 1369 (Fed. Cir. 2003)
(cleaned up). We apply a two-part test for determining if
steps that do not otherwise recite an order “must nonethe-
less be performed in the order in which they are written.”
Id. “First, we look to the claim language to determine if, as
a matter of logic or grammar, they must be performed in
the order written.” Id. “If not, we next look to the rest of
the specification to determine whether it directly or implic-
itly requires such a narrow construction. If not, the se-
quence in which such steps are written is not a
requirement.” Id. at 1370 (emphasis in original) (cleaned
up).
We agree with the district court that, as a matter of
logic or grammar, the communication module must be con-
figured to perform its steps in the order in which they are
written. As the court observed, in the first step, the com-
munication module is configured to transmit—to a server—
“the identity of the user and the identifier of the beverage.”
’377 patent claim 11; see Rothschild, 688 F. Supp. 3d
at 1297–98. In the second step, the communication module
is configured to receive—from the server—“user generated
beverage product preferences based on the identity of the
user and the identifier of the beverage” (i.e., “based on” the
very things that, in the first step, the communication
mobile app and the doctrine of equivalents. The district
court, in declining to consider this theory, referenced its lo-
cal patent rules and noted that Rothschild had not included
this theory in its infringement contentions or expert re-
ports. Under these circumstances, we see no abuse of dis-
cretion or otherwise reversible error in the district court’s
decision not to consider this theory.
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module is configured to transmit to the server). ’377 patent
claim 11 (emphasis added); see Rothschild, 688 F. Supp. 3d
at 1297–98. This use of “based on” strongly indicates that
the first step precedes the second. As to the third step—
“communicat[e] the user generated beverage product pref-
erences to controller,” ’377 patent claim 11—the court
viewed it as “send[ing] the product preferences received by
the communication module in [the second step] to the con-
troller,” Rothschild, 688 F. Supp. 3d at 1298. The court also
observed that this particular order accords with the speci-
fication, which not only contains language and figures de-
scribing this order, but also contains nothing suggesting
Rothschild’s contrary reading of claim 11. See id. at 1299
(citing ’377 patent col. 6 ll. 7–20, col. 7 l. 56–col. 8 l. 32, and
Figs. 3 & 5).
We agree with the district court’s “common-sense read-
ing” of this limitation and conclude that the communication
module must be configured to perform its steps in the order
in which they are written. See id. at 1298.
Rothschild disagrees. It insists that, because claim 11
is an apparatus claim, and because “apparatus claims
cover what a device is, not what a device does,” the claim
cannot require ordered steps. See Reply Br. 4 (quoting
Hewlett-Packard Co. v. Bausch & Lomb Inc., 909 F.2d
1464, 1468 (Fed. Cir. 1990) (emphasis in original)).
We are unpersuaded. The principle that apparatus
claims cover what a device is, not what it does, serves as a
“useful reminder that the focus of apparatus claims is the
structure and not the operation or use.” INVT SPE LLC v.
ITC, 46 F.4th 1361, 1376 (Fed. Cir. 2022) (citing Hewlett-
Packard, 909 F.2d at 1468). But when, as here, an appa-
ratus claim “depend[s] on functional claiming to describe
the apparatus,” “what the device does (and how it does it)
is highly relevant to understanding what the device is.”
See id. at 1376–77 (emphasis in original) (discussing com-
puter- or software-based inventions). Given that this
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apparatus claim includes functional language requiring
that the communication module be configured to do certain
things, we will not disregard language concerning how
(e.g., the order in which) it must do them.
III
We have considered Rothschild’s remaining arguments
and find them unpersuasive. For the foregoing reasons, we
affirm.
AFFIRMED
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