Law, Strategy, and Risk in Commercial Disputes
The patent assignment says the assignor — the Inventor — will receive a share of any "recovery of damages" from litigation of the heart-stent patent that he assigned.
The assignee — let's call it Scimed — sues an infringer — which we'll call Cordis. Cordis in turn brings an action against Scimed, accusing it of…
NYU Law School Professor Richard A. Epstein — "an advocate of minimal legal regulation" and "one of the most influential legal thinkers of modern times" — thinks the U.S. Supreme Court got its ruling wrong in Comcast Corp. v. Behrend, No. 11-864 (U.S. Mar. 27, 2013) (post here).
Leaving to one side the…
Blawgletter had the pleasure today of standing before the Chief Justice and eight Associate Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States. We urged their honors to send a case we've worked on for more than nine years back to the trial court . . . for trial.
We had not done that before…
Say you bought a share of Enron stock before it belly-flopped into chapter 11. You paid too much for it, right? $90 or so. And when the belly-flopping took place, the market price for your share in the Greatest Company Ever fell to, oh, about $1. You lost around $89 bucks, right?
Maybe. In your…
The Fifth Circuit ruled last week that the terms of an oil and gas lease could give a real estate firm the right to damages for drilling operations that hurt the firm's efforts to build and sell homes in a Shreveport subdivision. Greenwood 950, L.L.C. v. Chesapeake Louisiana, L.P., No. 11-30436 (5th Cir. June 12…
A firm fires an employee for the sole reason (say) that she refused to murder the CEO of the firm's main rival. May a jury consider, in deciding whether to award the employee punitive damages, the firm's murderous motive that resulted in the firing?
No, the Supreme Court of Texas held today. No matter how…
The Third Circuit today affirmed a class certification order in an antitrust case.
The case, Behrend v. Comcast Corp., No. 10-2865 (3d Cir. Aug. 23, 2011), involves claims that Comcast violated sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act and that the antitrust violations allowed Comcast to overcharge Philadelphia cable subscribers.
The court's 2-1…
You convince the trial judge that your side will likely win on the merits and that in the time between now and trial your client will suffer harm that money can't fix. The judge enjoins the other side — under Rule 65 — from doing the hurtful stuff pending trial. But the court of appeals vacates…
You may have wondered why patent cases have seemed so vogue in the last decade or so for hot shot trial lawyers. Blawgletter would not presume to tell you the cause. But perhaps it stems from the fact that, as Willie Sutton said, "that's where the money is."
But that now looks so two days ago. …
The Federal Circuit looked at a verdict for $6.5 million this week and held that the jury meant to award more.
The case involved three patents relating to "transmission of data in telecommunications networks." Telcordia Technologies, Inc. v. Cisco Systems, Inc., No. 09-1175, slip op. at 3 (Fed. Cir. July 7, 2010). One…