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A California judge has agreed to review a Samsung complaint that accused the jury foreman of misconduct in its recent patent trial against Apple.

Judge Lucy Koh said yesterday that she will “address” Samsung’s motion at a Dec. 6 hearing.

“The Court will consider the questions of whether the jury foreperson concealed information during voir dire, whether any concealed information was material, and whether any concealment constituted misconduct,” Judge Koh wrote in her order. “An assessment of such issues is intertwined with the question of whether and when Apple had a duty to disclose the circumstances and timing of its discovery of information about the foreperson.”

In early October, Samsung requested a new patent trial against Apple due to juror misconduct, among other things.

According to Samsung, jury foreman Velvin Hogan “failed to answer truthfully” during jury selection. When asked if he or someone close to him had ever been involved in a lawsuit, Hogan recalled one such suit, but failed to mention two others, Samsung said. That included a suit his former employer, Seagate, brought against Hogan for breach of contract, as well as a personal bankruptcy filing.

Seagate has a “substantial strategic relationship” with Samsung, the company said. Furthermore, the attorney who sued Hogan on Seagate’s behalf is a partner with Quinn Emanual, Samsung’s law firm.

“Hogan’s failure to disclose the Seagate suit raises issues of bias that Samsung should have been allowed to explore in questioning and that would have triggered a motion to strike for cause or a peremptory strike,” Samsung said.

Samsung also said Hogan withheld other details in order to secure a place on the jury.

Hogan has denied any wrongdoing.

The trial in question ended with the jury awarding Apple $ 1.05 billion in patent damages. Samsung has appealed.

For more from Chloe, follow her on Twitter @ChloeAlbanesius.

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Apple’s feud with Samsung may just be costing both companies a lot more money and missed opportunities than the fines and legal costs accrued in their patent battles in various jurisdictions around the world would indicate.

We learned this week that Samsung may be delaying the construction of a planned logic fabrication facility as it digests the possibility of losing out on future chip orders from Apple. The company “is likely to put off the construction” of its Line-17 fab in Hwaseong, South Korea, DigiTimes reported earlier this week.

Now a rumor is swirling that Apple may have recently given billions of dollars to a financially struggling supplier of iPhone components as part of an effort to avoid having to rely on Samsung for those parts.

Mobile analyst Horace Dediu of Asymco theorized Wednesday that Apple may just have shoveled over a cool $ 2 billion to struggling Sharp last quarter to ensure that the supplier, which Apple has tapped to provide the touchscreen displays for its new iPhone 5 in lieu of former supplier Samsung, survived to actually deliver those parts.

Dediu reckoned that Apple’s October revelation that it had $ 2.3 billion in expenditures over its forecast pointed to something odd going on. Apparently, Apple earmarked the bulk of that sum for “product tooling, manufacturing process equipment, and infrastructure.” The Asymco analyst, putting two and two together, figured that an asset-swap covering “slush fund” payment to beleaguered Sharp—which had “hemorrhaged” $ 1.3 billion over the first half of 2012, as Fortune’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt put it — may have been necessary to get production of the iPhone 5 displays up and running.

How dire was the situation? Elmer-DeWitt posited that in the summer, Apple was up a creek just a few weeks ahead of the iPhone 5 launch when “August came and went and the displays from Sharp were AWOL.” In September, he noted, Sharp somehow found the resources to fire up its factories and start producing the components, but until Dediu supplied his theory, it was a bit of a mystery as to how that happened.

For more from Damon, follow him on Twitter @dpoeter.

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