To take on the oil field services industry, patent licensing giant Acacia Research Corp. needed a lawyer who knew the business. It may have found one who knew too much.
In 2013, Acacia, a publicly traded company that is known as one of the world’s biggest patent trolls, was in something of a slump. With its revenues in decline, Newport Beach, California-based Acacia hired a new senior vice president out of Houston, a seasoned in-house lawyer named Charlotte Rutherford, to help it exploit a relatively untapped well of intellectual property tied to the global oil rush.
