Nearly two years after rolling out a model order intended to get a grip on out-of-control electronic-discovery demands, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit's advisory council is poised to issue new rules that ask patent litigants to make their own sacrifices.

Rambus is still paying for its decision to shred reams of documents before it launched a litigation campaign against a big swath of the semiconductor industry. The latest blow came on Friday, when the judge most sympathetic to Rambus over the years ruled that the company spoliated evidence and signaled that he would reduce a $397 million judgment that Rambus won against rival SK Hynix in 2009.

An iconic liquor scored an injunction against an alleged copycat and a small furniture maker accused a larger retailer of ripping off its designs. In the smartphone wars, Samsung Electronic Co. Ltd. uncovered some ammunition in its bid to undo the $1 billion verdict it lost to Apple in August.