Apple Inc. and LG Electronics Co. persuaded an appeals court Thursday to finish off a $180 million patent case brought by Alcatel-Lucent SA. The ruling comes just a week after oral arguments that pitted the smartphone makers’ heavyweight lawyers at Fish & Richardson and Jones Day against equally formidable counsel from Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan.
In a one-sentence order, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed a 2012 jury verdict that smartphones sold by Apple and LG don’t infringe video compression patents owned by an Alcatel-Lucent subsidiary called Multimedia Patent Trust. MPT appellate counsel Kathleen Sullivan of Quinn Emanuel had urged the panel to rule that the trial judge erroneously instructed jurors about how to interpret the patent claims at issue.
