The lawsuit

Maine-based AJ Marketing LLC filed suit against Juul Labs on September 3, 2026, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware (case No. 1:26-cv-01110). The complaint alleges that both the original JUUL and the newly authorized JUUL2 devices infringe U.S. Patent No. 8,851,068, titled “Personal Inhalation Devices.”

AJ Marketing is not a downstream licensing shell. It is the original assignee of the patent. The patent’s inventors, Scott A. Cohen and Michael J. Bedecs, assigned their rights to the company back in 2010, when the underlying application was filed. The patent issued on October 7, 2014.

According to the complaint, the technology traces back to an effort to deliver metered doses of caffeine to military pilots, pitched as a non impairing alternative to the amphetamines historically used to keep aircrews alert. But the patent’s claims are broader than caffeine delivery alone. It covers a personal inhalation device: an outer shell with an orifice, a reservoir holding a “medium,” and an atomizing unit that vaporizes the medium and doses it to the user on each puff. The patent explicitly lists nicotine, medications, vitamins and even THC (in permitting jurisdictions) as possible payloads alongside caffeine.

AJ Marketing alleges Juul’s heating and delivery system infringes those claims. The suit seeks a reasonable royalty covering the six years preceding the filing, plus an ongoing royalty through the patent’s expiration, estimated by Bloomberg Law at January 2031. Juul Labs has not yet responded in court.

The lawsuit lands exactly a week after the FDA authorized the JUUL2 device and two accompanying pods through the Premarket Tobacco Product Application (PMTA) pathway, clearing Juul’s second generation platform for legal U.S. marketing. AJ Marketing named JUUL2 explicitly in its infringement claims, meaning Juul’s newly cleared product enters the market already tangled in litigation.

Not Juul’s first patent fight

Juul has spent much of the past two years on both sides of the patent litigation table against rival Altria and its NJOY subsidiary.

In August 2025, Juul filed a complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission seeking to block imports of Altria owned NJOY Ace devices, alongside a parallel infringement suit in Delaware federal court. Juul argued the NJOY Ace, the only pod based device with FDA marketing authorization at the time, infringed its patents, and pointed to a perfect record in three prior ITC cases against counterfeit and unauthorized compatible products.

Altria’s NJOY unit answered with its own ITC complaint and a companion Delaware lawsuit, accusing Juul’s flagship JUUL device and JUULpods of infringing two patents that NJOY had acquired from Fuma International as part of a separate patent settlement.

Juul separately sued NJOY and Altria in Arizona federal court, alleging NJOY Daily infringed a Juul nicotine salt patent. That case took an unusual turn: newly unsealed filings showed an ITC judge had found that vaping products sold by R.J. Reynolds back in 2013 already contained every element of Juul’s asserted nicotine salt claims, evidence Altria and NJOY are now using to argue the patent lacked novelty and should be invalidated.

The bigger picture

This pattern of litigation on multiple fronts, in multiple forums (ITC, Delaware, Arizona), often running in both directions at once, has defined Juul’s relationship with Altria/NJOY since Altria fully divested its Juul stake in 2023 and later acquired NJOY’s competing product line without licensing Juul’s patent portfolio.

The AJ Marketing case is a departure from that pattern in one respect. AJ Marketing is not a competing vaping company but appears to be a pure patent holder, asserting a decade old patent with no vaping product of its own on the market, a profile closer to what’s commonly termed a non practicing entity than to an operating rival like NJOY.

Whether Juul challenges the patent’s validity, given its 2010 priority date and broad “personal inhalation device” claim language that predates the pod vape category as it exists today.

Whether AJ Marketing seeks an injunction or settles for royalties; the complaint as reported asks only for damages, not a sales ban.

Whether this becomes a template for other legacy inhalation patent holders to test claims against the now much larger and more valuable pod vape market, especially as JUUL2 rolls out under fresh FDA authorization.

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The end of the saga, or just another twist?

It is a saga that began more than ten years ago. In 2015, Juul Labs launched its pod system in the United States. The device proved hugely successful, both among adult smokers and some minors with no previous history of smoking. Under regulatory and media pressure, Juul voluntarily withdrew several of its flavored pods from the U.S. market. Flavors such as mango and crème disappeared, leaving only tobacco and menthol.

As the years passed, lawsuits against Juul continued to pile up. Several states notably accused the manufacturer of being directly responsible for the large number of minors vaping in the United States. An “epidemic of e-cigarette use among teenagers”, as then-Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Scott Gottlieb had described it a few years earlier.

In mid-2022, the FDA banned all Juul products in the United States, citing insufficient data on their health effects and conflicting data regarding their genotoxicity. But just twelve days later, the regulator itself reversed the decision, stating simply that certain scientific questions concerning Juul pods warranted further review. The products were allowed back onto the market in the meantime.

Between 2022 and 2024, the FDA conducted an in-depth review of all the data it held on Juul products. During those two years, the regulatory agency faced numerous lawsuits from manufacturers whose products had been denied authorization. The FDA lost several of these cases, with some rulings describing its actions as “arbitrary and capricious”, or finding that it had imposed certain evaluation criteria that were inconsistent with the guidance it had itself provided manufacturers on how to obtain authorization for their products.

In mid-2024, the FDA formally rescinded the bans imposed on Juul products two years earlier. It stressed, however, that this did not amount to an authorization, but simply meant that its review of the products for which Juul had applied for marketing authorization would resume. The agency also noted that its decision took into account several recent court rulings. Ironically, the January 2024 ruling that apparently influenced this reversal would itself be overturned a year later. On April 2, 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously sided with the FDA in the case, by nine votes to zero, finding that the agency had not acted arbitrarily when denying the marketing applications. The FDA had therefore softened its position under pressure from a legal precedent that, a year later, would no longer stand.

In 2025, the Food and Drug Administration finally authorized five Juul products for legal sale in the United States. Then, on August 28, 2026, it authorized three additional products: the Juul2 device and two tobacco- and menthol-flavored pods containing 18 mg/mL of nicotine. Juul had been seeking authorization to market these products since 2023.

Juul has already indicated that it intends to submit further marketing applications for pods containing higher nicotine concentrations and additional flavors.

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