In a post here last March, we told you about Lone Star Document Management, a company that had filed a string of patent infringement lawsuits against a number of e-discovery and legal technology vendors, including Catalyst. The lawsuits claimed infringement of U.S. patent 6,918,082, which describes a system for proofing PDF documents delivered over a network.

On Friday, Lone Star announced that it had settled its lawsuit against e-discovery company Case Central, with Case Central signing a license agreement for the patent. That brought to 16 the number of companies that have signed license agreements with Lone Star, the announcement said.

In addition to Case Central, three other e-discovery companies have settled with Lone Star: CloudNine Discovery, Digital Reef Inc., and Lexbe LLC. License agreements have also been signed by Motive Systems (now M-Files); ITAZ Technologies; Intelledox Inc.; Alfresco Software; Adlib Publishing Systems; Hyland Software; Paperhost.com; VIZit Software; Appligent DSI; Atalasoft; Gallivan, Gallivan & O’Melia; and CAP Digisoft, Inc.

That leaves Lone Star with two two active lawsuits, one against Catalyst and another against Compulink Management Center Inc., reporter Evan Koblentz of Law Technology News reported yesterday. The two companies are cooperating in a joint defense pool.

Back when the lawsuits were announced, Catalyst CEO John Tredennick  told Koblentz that he considered them “baloney.” Some of the patent’s claims do not apply to e-discovery software, he said then, and those that do – such as the ability for users to add comments to documents – were standard methods well before this patent was filed in 1998.

This week, Tredennick reiterated his intent to fight the case. “We are still fighting this thing,” he told Koblentz. “Somebody’s got to stand up for e-discovery around here.”

“We certainly haven’t settled,” Tredennick continued. “We’ll stand up for the e-discovery industry. The question plain and simple was whether somebody thought of putting images on a network for litigation before 1998.”