On June 18, 2015, a jury returned a verdict in favor of Dataquill Limited on patent claims asserted against ZTE USA (the fourth largest smartphone manufacturer in the U.S. at the time). (Other cases against Apple and Huawei were resolved before trial.) The Dataquill patents concern smartphone technology, which were asserted against ZTE’s Android smartphones. HPC tried the case with its co-counsel at Susman Godfrey.

The jury found that all asserted claims in three patents were valid and infringed, and awarded significant damages that represented the twelfth largest verdict in Texas for 2015 and the fifty-ninth largest nationally, according to VerdictSearch. It was also ranked as the third largest Intellectual Property verdict if Texas for 2015, according to VerdictSearch. A settlement was announced in December of 2015.

On March 20, 2013, a jury returned a verdict in favor of Two-Way Media LLC, a company based in Colorado, on patent claims asserted against several AT&T entities and its related regional carriers. The TWM patents concern audio and video streaming, and were asserted against AT&T’s U-verse television service (which employs Microsoft’s Mediaroom software). HPC tried the case with its co-counsel at Susman Godfrey.

The jury found that AT&T infringed the claims in two patents under the doctrine of equivalents. The jury further found that AT&T had not proven the patent claims invalid, and awarded significant damages that represented the seventh largest verdict in Texas and 71^st largest verdict nationally for 2013, according to VerdictSearch. It also ranked first in Texas for the largest Intellectual Property verdict of 2015, according to VerdictSearch. After adding a significant sum of pre-judgment interest, the court entered a Final Judgment in favor of Two-Way Media.

On March 19, 2015, the Federal Circuit affirmed the Final Judgment in favor of Two-Way Media. Leslie Payne of HPC argued for Two-Way Media before the Federal Circuit in December 2014. Click Here To See The Federal Circuit Opinion. A settlement was announced in 2015, after the Federal Circuit affirmance.

Prior to the lawsuit against AT&T, HPC also represented Two-Way Media in a case against America Online.  The AOL settled during trial, after a favorable Markman ruling. That settlement is confidential.

On May 26, 2011, a jury returned a verdict in favor of Fractus, S.A, an antenna company based in Barcelona, Spain, on all trial claims asserted against Samsung. The claims were spread across four related patents in Fractus’ Multilevel Patent family, generally covering multiband antennas used in portable communication devices, such as cell phones. HPC tried the case with its co-counsel at Susman Godfrey.

The jury found that Samsung infringed the claims literally and under the doctrine of equivalents, as well as finding that Samsung’s infringement was willful. After finding that Samsung had not proven the patent claims invalid, the jury entered a verdict awarding significant damages that represented the tenth largest verdict in Texas and 69^th largest verdict nationally for 2011, according to VerdictSearch. It was also ranked as the fifth largest Intellectual Property verdict if Texas for 2011, according to VerdictSearch., according to VerdictSearch. After damages were significantly enhanced by the district court judge based on the willful infringement, the court entered a final judgment for a substantial sum. The district court judge also entered an ongoing royalty rate for future infringement in the amount of 60 cents per unit for each infringing phone or tablet sold by Samsung after the date of the jury verdict.

Click Here To See The Jury Verdict
Click Here To See The Final Judgment

Samsung appealed the judgment to the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, where HPC took the lead on the appellate briefing, working closely with its co-counsel Susman Godfrey.  After oral argument at the Federal Circuit, a settlement was announced in 2014.

Prior to trial, the HPC Fractus legal team also assisted in licensing the Fractus patent portfolio to several other parties, resulting in significant licensing fees. Most of those parties, including LG Electronics, Blackberry, HTC, and Kyocera, were the subject of lawsuits brought by HPC and Susman Godfrey that settled before trial.

HPC represented the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (“CSIRO”) in patent litigation related to its groundbreaking research in the area of wireless local area networking technology. CSIRO is Australia’s national science agency with facilities across Australia. It holds U.S. Patent No. 5,487,069, entitled “Wireless LAN,” which describes technology used to allow devices to communicate over a wireless local area network (WLAN).  Specifically, the ‘069 patent discloses a wireless LAN system that increases throughput while ensuring reliability by using Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) in conjunction with other sophisticated signal processing techniques such as Forward Error Correction and Interleaving.  The claims cover fundamental aspects of the IEEE 802.11a, g and n standards, which are commonly referred to as Wi-Fi. The use of Wi-Fi in laptops, smartphones and other devices around the world has grown exponentially in recent years. The ‘069 patent is widely recognized as the seminal patent in the area of Wi-Fi technology, and the CSIRO inventors have been recognized as pioneers in their field.  They have received many awards, including the 2012 European Inventor of the Year award, the 2017 IEEE Consumer Electronics Award, and were named as Members of the Order of Australia.

HPC first started its representation of CSIRO when the ‘069 patent was challenged in reexamination proceedings.  HPC assisted in successfully navigating CSIRO through those patentability challenges. Subsequently, HPC was retained in a series of patent infringement lawsuits, brought against Broadcom, Atheros, Lenovo, T-Mobile, Sony Corporation, Verizon, Acer, and AT&T. Those parties settled shortly before trial on terms very favorable to CSIRO. That settlement was announced in 2013. In 2016, CSIRO reported that it had received well over $400 million in licenses for the ‘069 patent.

Subsequently, HPC represented CSIRO against RealTek, MediaTek, Texas Instruments.  Those cases also settled before trial on favorable terms. Settlement was announced in 2015.

In addition, HPC represented CSIRO against Cisco. After discovery, Cisco stipulated to infringement and validity, and the case proceeded to trial solely on the issue of damages.  HPC, along with its co-counsel at Kobre Kim, tried the issue of damages to the district court. The court awarded significant damages to CSIRO in its order. The case then went up on appeal at the Federal Circuit and the case was ultimately settled in May of 2017.

CSIRO Wins Legal Battle Over Wi-Fi Patent, Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Rembrandt Wireless retained HPC and its co-counsel Ahmad, Zavitsanos and Anaipakos (AZA) to enforce US Patent Nos. 8,023,580 and 8,457,228 against Samsung.  The ‘580 and ‘228 patents cover technology developed at Paradyne Corporation which allows modems that communicate using different modulation types to coexist in the same network.  The ‘580 and ‘228 patents were asserted against Samsung devices that include Bluetooth Enhanced Data Rate (EDR) capabilities.  The Samsung EDR devices use both a GFSK (Gaussian Frequency Shift Keying) modulation technique and a faster PSK (Phase Shift Keying) modulation technique that allows data rate transmissions 2 or 3 times as fast the original FSK modulation used in the original Bluetooth specifications.

Samsung sought to invalidate the Rembrandt patents through a series of 13 separate IPR filings before the US Patent & Trademark Office.  Certain claims of the ‘580 and ‘228 patents survived these repeated IPR attacks, and HPC and AZA proceeded to trial in the Eastern District of Texas on those claims.  On February 13, 2015, the jury, after deliberating less than one hour, found that the asserted claims were valid and infringed by the accused Samsung products with the Bluetooth EDR functionality, and awarded Rembrandt significant damages that represented the 23^rd largest verdict in Texas in 2015, according to VerdictSearch. It was also ranked as the sixth largest Intellectual Property verdict if Texas for 2015, according to VerdictSearch.

After trial, Samsung appealed the verdict on multiple grounds.  HPC took the lead on the appellate briefing, working closely with its co-counsel at AZA.  Michael Heim at HPC successfully argued the appeal on behalf of Rembrandt, resulting in an affirmance on all liability issues and on the damages methodology used to calculate damages.  In addition to these affirmances, the Federal Circuit remanded for further consideration of a marking issue.

Attorneys at HPC represented MicroUnity in its patent enforcement efforts starting in 2003. MicroUnity obtained numerous patents covering its pioneering work related to the processing of media data in computer systems. HPC, along with its co-counsel at Susman Godfrey, filed multiple lawsuits against the following defendants: Intel, Dell, AMD, Sony, Apple, Samsung, Qualcomm, and Texas Instruments.

MicroUnity is a Silicon Valley company that was founded in the late 1980’s by John Moussouris, a former founder of MIPS) to develop new microprocessor designs and an instruction set that more efficiently processed media data in a general purpose microprocessor. Although the company never realized its goal of commercially manufacturing and selling its microprocessors, the company’s development efforts extended microprocessors beyond their historical role as calculating and control devices to make them instrumental in the processing of media data in personal computers, laptops, tablets, smartphones, set-top boxes, televisions and other digital consumer and communications devices. MicroUnity’s Media Processor patent portfolio covers these design innovations and the novel multimedia instruction set extensions that it developed.

HPC attorneys successfully represented MicroUnity in its patent infringement lawsuits in the Eastern District of Texas against many of the world’s leading microprocessor companies including Intel and AMD; against game console manufacturers such as Sony; and against the bulk of the smartphone industry for its use of ARM-based processors. HPC took a leading role in the enforcement strategy of the MicroUnity portfolio throughout its representation and also took the lead on the infringement and validity aspects of the case, steering MicroUnity to repeated victories throughout the representation.

All of the MicroUnity lawsuits settled prior to the start of trial, on terms that have been exceptionally favorable to MicroUnity. For example, Intel publicly disclosed that it licensed the MicroUnity portfolio for $300 million in its third quarter 2005 10-K. The other MicroUnity settlements remain confidential.

HPC represented PACT in its patent infringement lawsuit against Xilinx, the world’s largest manufacturer of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (“FPGAs”), and Avnet, the primary distributor of Xilinx’s FPGAs. PACT is a German company that pioneered the “coarse grained” technology used in modern FPGAs, including revolutionary bus interface systems and dynamically reconfigurable processing cells. PACT’s patent portfolio covers that technology, amongst others. HPC tried the case with its co-counsel at Susman Godfrey.

In May 2012, a jury returned a verdict in favor of PACT. After only a few hours of deliberation, the jury found the patents valid and returned a verdict that Xilinx willfully infringed two of PACT’s patents. The jury awarded significant damages that represented the eighteenth largest verdict in Texas, according to VerdictSearch. It was also ranked as the fourth largest Intellectual Property verdict if Texas for 2015, according to VerdictSearch.

In September 2013, the court entered a final judgment that significantly enhanced damages and awarded PACT attorneys’ fees, interest and costs.

A settlement was announced in 2012.