Irell & Manella has secured a $240 million damages award for licensing company StreamScale, a win that comes hot on the heels of another major victory for the firm’s patent litigation team.
Jason Sheasby and Lisa Glasser advised StreamScale in its patent infringement case against data management business Cloudera.
The ruling, which centred on patents covering erasure coding, was issued at the District Court for the Western District of Texas on Friday, October 13.
The latest win comes six months after Sheasby and Glasser helped another client, Netlist, win $303 million in damages in a patent infringement case against Samsung. Managing IP covered the Netlist ruling for its ‘Behind the case’ series.
Sheasby and Glasser acted as co-lead counsel in both cases.
Sheasby, who conducted the oral arguments in both cases, tells Managing IP that StreamScale approached the firm because of its history of defending small inventors.
"In particular, [they were impressed by] our work on behalf of KAIST IP against Samsung in the Eastern District of Texas where we obtained a $400 million verdict," he says.
The firm obtained this verdict in 2018.
Casting doubt
In obtaining the $240 million verdict, Sheasby and Glasser had to counteract Cloudera’s argument that only 83 of a possible 34,000 computer clusters at issue in the case used erasure coding.
Cloudera claimed that because the use was so low, any damages award should also be low. Sheasby said his firm argued that the 83 clusters were in fact owned by the largest technology, financial, and industrial companies in the world.
“If this technology was not valuable, [the defendant] could have presented testimony from customers to support them. Not one showed up; not one provided testimony,” Sheasby said.
Sheasby's team also argued that there were significant gaps in Cloudera’s evidence, which cast doubt on the claim that only 83 computer clusters were at issue.
The firm also focused on the defendant’s “gushing description” of erasure coding in its customer materials.
This, according to Sheasby, helped contradict the defendant’s assertion that the technology was not valuable.
“Jurors are repeatedly told, correctly, that what attorneys say is not evidence. When a party tries to make assertions that contradict what they wrote in public statements, this has consequences,” said Sheasby.
One such consequence, according to Sheasby, is a “credibility gap”. This occurs when a party that tries to disassociate itself from its statements provides an opportunity for the opposing party to increase its own credibility.
Sheasby said his firm took a similar approach during the Netlist trial.
“There is, for better or worse, a significant suspicion of large technology companies in today’s environment. Many folks of goodwill believe that large technology companies are not trustworthy,” Sheasby said.
“In Netlist, we contrasted what Samsung said to the Korean government regarding the importance of Netlist’s technology with what they were trying to say in front of the jury.”
Sheasby also previously told Managing IP that the large verdict in the Netlist case partially resulted from the substantial sale of the infringing products.
Companies should try to keep their public statements consistent with what they present to juries. Otherwise, they could be on the receiving end of more multi-million dollar awards.
