Intellectual Property

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How many trial lawyers sit on the U.S. Supreme Court?
How many trial lawyers sit on the U.S. Supreme Court?

In the last quarter-century and more, no current member of the Supreme Court tried a lawsuit of any kind to a judge or jury. Almost none of the justices has ever tried a civil case to verdict. And before their honors became appellate judges, only one of their number served as a full-time trial judge.

Does the justices’ nearly total lack of trial-lawyer chops matter? Has the almost utter absence of actual trial experience in fact degraded the quality of civil justice? And will confirming the nomination of a former trial lawyer like Neil Gorsuch make a difference?Continue Reading A Trial Lawyer for the Supreme Court?

Patent pirates?
New rules for patent pirates.

Extraordinary protection

Since 2007, wanton patent infringers have enjoyed extraordinary legal protection from awards of “enhanced” damages under section 284 of the Patent Act.

Last week, the Supreme Court stripped away three of the protections. The changes will make good patent cases better. But it won’t convert weak ones into strong ones.
Continue Reading Patent Cases Just Got Scarier

imageIn Henry IV, Glenmore brags that he can “call spirits from the vasty deep.” Hotspur replies:

Why, so can I, or so can any man;

But will they come when you do call for them?

In Blue Calypso, LLC v. Groupon Inc., No. 15-1396 (Fed. Cir. Mar. 1, 2016), Groupon tried to summon a prior art reference from the Internet. But it wouldn’t come. The Internet proved too vasty.
Continue Reading The Vasty Deep (of the Internet)

imageRisky business

Patent infringement cases involve an immense amount of risk. Why?

Answers by people who know — especially plaintiffs-side attorneys who work on a contingent-fee basis — will cluster around three facts of life in patent disputes:

  1. high stakes,
  2. huge costs, and
  3. the propensity of the Federal Circuit to undo trial court rulings.

This post deals with the hazards awaiting you behind door number three.
Continue Reading Federal Circuit Doubles Down on De Novo Review

PortfolioFinding your patents

Since 1990, 4,008,329 utility patents have won U.S. Patent and Trademark Office approval. In 2014 alone, the USPTO granted more than 300,000 of them. And those awards went to a wide range of patenting entities — 38,000 of them, in fact.

If you do legal work for companies of any size, those clients of yours likely own at least one patent and may have quite a few (several hundred entities received 40 or more patent grants just in 2014). Do you have any idea how many or what inventions they cover?

Don’t worry if you don’t. You can get a list and see a copy of the patents in no time flat.
Continue Reading Should You Do a Patent Portfolio Review?

FundingBig dollars in business cases

Expenses in big-dollar lawsuits can run into the millions of dollars. An antitrust class action that I’ve handled since 2003, for instance, cost more than $8 million. The law firms representing the class fronted all that money, with no assurance we would ever get any of it back. Why would any sane person do such a thing?
Continue Reading The Cost of Funding Litigation Expenses

FundingSizable expenses

A big commercial case can cost millions in expenses — by which I mean out-of-pocket costs that the plaintiff or its counsel must pay net of attorneys’ fees. A portfolio of cases — for infringement of a patent or family of patents, say — can run many millions more. Who will bear that burden? And what will it cost?
Continue Reading The Cost of Third-Party Litigation Funding

You can send photos and other things via multimedia messaging service
MMS = multimedia messaging service

Summit sued Samsung for infringing a patent on “Web-Based Media Submission Tool”. It alleged that Samsung smartphones infringed the patent by enabling users to send pictures through the web/Internet via multimedia messaging service (MMS). A jury awarded Summit $15 million — a little more than half…