Law, Strategy, and Risk in Commercial Disputes
A Seattle jury today hit Motorola with a $14 to $15 million damages award for bad faith in negotiating to license patents that Microsoft's Xbox and Windows products infringe.
The dispute involved patents that Microsoft holds on technologies relating to wireless local area networks and video coding.
Two standard-setting organizations (SSOs) incorporated the Motorola technologies into standards that they set — H.264 and 802.11…
A Houston jury awarded Wellogix $94.4 million for Accenture's misappropriation of trade secrets in software that helped oil and gas companies track and manage costs of drilling wells. The judge cut the award to what Wellogix asked for — $26.2 million in actual damages plus $18.2 million in punies. And today the Fifth Circuit affirmed.
A law prof at a small school in the Golden State opined that the jury in Apple v. Samsung went Way Too Far when on August 24 it awarded Apple almost $1.05 billion after finding that Samsung copied — very much on purpose — Apple's smartphone designs.
His analysis? That an "average smartphone may arguably…
Top legal writer Alison Frankel wrote a first class piece on Rambus's stunning loss this week of a price-fixing case against two chip makers that, ahem, had confessed to fixing prices. See .
Rambus accused Hynix and Micron ruined a sweet deal with Intel, which agreed to build Rambus technology into Intel chips. Micron and…
Blawgletter's friends at Above the Law (and its sister site Dealbreaker) give the scoop on the 14-count guilty verdict against hedge fund master of the universe Raj Rajaratnam.
Make that former master of the universe.
A couple of thoughts came to us as we read the news flash:
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Remember Capron v. Van Noordan, 6 U.S. (2 Cranch) 126 (1804)?
How about Strawbridge v. Curtiss, 7 U.S. (3 Cranch) 267 (1806)?
From your civil procedure class? In law school? Nothin'?
Well, even if you don't, we may all take comfort in the fact that the D.C. Circuit does. Indeed, the holdings in…
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…
The Cameron (Texas) Herald reports today:
After just a little more than two hours of deliberation, the jury returned a verdict in favor of Luminant in its breach of contract case against Alcoa.
After resting their case in chief, the attorneys for Luminant requested a directed verdict for a second time, but the request was
…