Douglas Greenswag and Patrick McElhinny of K&L Gates rocked the technology world on December 26, winning a $1.17 billion verdict for Carnegie Mellon University that, if it stands, will give the school a huge cash infusion, as well as wipe out a year’s worth of profit for a major Silicon Valley company.
A federal jury in CMU’s hometown of Pittsburgh returned a verdict that the semiconductor manufacturer Marvell Technology GroupLtd infringed two CMU patents covering methods of reading data from disk drives. The award, the largest verdict of 2012, came after a four-week trial and less than a day of jury deliberation. K&L Gates’s win came against Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, a firm that now finds itself on the losing end of the two biggest jury verdicts of the year. Quinn Emanuel represented Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. in a closely watched patent fight with Apple Inc., which climaxed in a $1.05 billion infringement verdict for Apple in August [Big Suits, November 2012].
