Exafer Ltd v. Microsoft Corporation: Date Argued: February 4th, 2026; Docket Number: 24-2296

Case Summary:

In Alignment Healthcare Inc. v. HHS (Docket No. 25-5239), argued before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit on February 2, 2026, Alignment Healthcare appealed a lower court ruling regarding the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS) "Star Ratings" program. The factual record focuses on CMS's use of the Tukey Outlier Rule to set quality thresholds and allegations that the agency ignored language barriers and survey reliability issues for Spanish-speaking enrollees. While the district court ordered a recalculation for one specific Arizona plan due to misprocessed member appeals, it upheld the broader statistical methodology, a finding that Alignment is now challenging at the appellate level to secure potentially billions in withheld bonus payments.

In Exafer Ltd v. Microsoft Corporation (Docket No. 24-2296), argued before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on February 4, 2026, the dispute involves networking technology used in Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform. The case reached the Federal Circuit after a district court in the Western District of Texas excluded Exafer’s damages expert for using unaccused products as a royalty base and subsequently granted summary judgment of "no damages" for Microsoft. The central factual issue on appeal is whether technical evidence of "saved CPU cycles" can independently support a reasonable royalty award in the absence of a surviving expert damages model.