SAD Scheme Defendant Gets Damages Payout from the Bond–Bright Head v. Schedule A Defendants

[This is a ruling from a month ago…I just learned about it.]

The court starts out: “Plaintiff’s pursuit of a preliminary injunction in this “Schedule A” patent infringement suit fizzled out after plaintiff abandoned its appeal of my order denying that relief.” The bond amount was $10k. One of the restrained defendants sought damages out of the bond.

The defendant claimed $94k of damages due to the TRO. The court said the evidence supporting the $94k wasn’t adequate.

As a plan B, the defendant sought the $10k bond. A subsequent defense affidavit cured some of the court’s initial evidentiary objections.

The plaintiff objected to the defendant’s evidence as “self-serving.” Say what?? Every litigant provides self-serving evidence–including the plaintiff’s “self-serving” allegations when it requested–and received–the improperly granted TRO. By design, the adversarial system of adjudication expects each side to tell their best story and discredit the other side’s best story. That system breaks down when proceedings are ex parte, like the TRO the court ordered, because the plaintiff’s self-serving statements can go unchecked. So it’s WILD for a SAD Scheme plaintiff to object that a *defendant’s* filing is self-serving. As the Genie said in Aladdin:

With the defendant’s additional evidence, the court awards the $10k bond to the defendant. While that amount probably doesn’t fully compensate the defendant for its losses, the defendant still got more justice than most SAD Scheme defendants get.

I’m blogging this incident because it raises an obvious question: how do, and should, courts determine the amount of bonds that SAD Scheme plaintiffs must post to support their TRO requests? I am not aware of any bond-setting formula that courts have adopted to calculate optimal bond rates. (If you are aware of any literature on this point, I’d appreciate the referral). As a result, courts seemingly set completely arbitrary bond amounts. Of course, the defense can’t request higher bond amounts in ex parte proceedings, so the court has no idea how much harm any defendant could suffer from the TRO.

In my study of SAD Scheme judicial standing orders, I noted that “As of December 29, 2025, the web pages of Judges Alonso, Durkin, and Valderrama (all N.D. Ill.) specify a presumptive bond amount of $1,000 per SAD Scheme defendant.” As the dollars at issue in this case suggests, that amount is almost certainly too little, perhaps by one or even two orders of magnitude.

Judges have the discretion to set higher bond amounts in SAD Scheme cases. To avoid outcomes like this case, I hope they will assert that discretion more aggressively. As a fallback plan, they should be more open to scrutinizing the plaintiff’s possible bad faith in requesting the TRO, so that a too-small bond amount doesn’t improperly cap the defendant’s damages.

Case Citation: Bright Head, LLC v. Schedule A Defendants, 1:24-cv-13410 (N.D. Ill. April 6, 2026). #StopTheSADScheme