Intellectual Property Litigation
Freeborn & Peters LLP has been a leader in patent and intellectual property litigation for more than 20 years. During that time, the firm has litigated many cases raising patent infringement and validity issues, state law trade secret, and Lanham Act and Copyright Act claims.
Approach
Freeborn & Peters intellectual property trial lawyers combine technical knowledge with litigation skills to effectively present intellectual property cases to non-technical judges, juries or arbitrators. We regularly provide patent valuations relative to intellectual property litigation. We believe this focus creates a distinct advantage over the same presentation by traditional patent counsel or technically inexperienced general litigators. Freeborn & Peters’ team includes many skilled trial lawyers experienced in patent litigation who pride themselves on being able to understand and explain highly technical concepts to a lay audience in an understandable manner, eliminating needless complexity.
Because we often face experienced patent litigation firms across the country, our attorneys regularly deal with sophisticated issues and tactics, such as the claim disclosure regimen of the Northern District of California Local Patent Rules. Many of our recent cases have been opposite large national recognized firms. We have a successful record against these firms, including outright victories and favorable settlements.
Experience
Recently the firm has acted as national coordinating counsel for patent litigation for a major NYSE-traded technology company. This assignment has resulted in our direct participation in or supervision of patent litigation in multiple federal district courts from coast to coast and before the International Trade Commission.
In early 2006, Freeborn & Peters prepared and presented in an evidentiary trial setting 30 representative patents which a mediator then evaluated for senior executives of our client and one of its key competitors to facilitate cross-licensing negotiations. In mid-2006, after completing the final pre-trial process in an infringement case for another client, we settled the case favorably and literally on the courthouse steps.
Our recent patent litigation experience has required expertise in a wide range of technologies, including the following art areas:
Data capture systems with client-server communications and multi-tasking operating systems.
RFID tag design, construction and base station recognition technology involving both the EPC Global Class-1 Generation-2 UHF protocol and earlier designs.
Wireless data communications involving “Wi-Fi” (IEEE 802.11) standards.
Medical and consumer products, including specialized wound and burn dressings.
Digital Spread Spectrum encoding and Phase Shift Keying for radio transmissions.
Laser scanners and non-imaging light collectors.
Hand-held computers, personal digital assistants and digital cameras.
Optical character recognition techniques with fuzzy or multi-dimensional symbols.
Fuzzy logic control circuitry.
Computer controlled valve operating machines.
Electronic fuel injection systems, carburetors and specialized exhaust systems for internal combustion engines.
Luggage, including ski and snow board bags.
Artificial fireplaces.
Freeborn & Peters also regularly litigates to protect our clients’ brands, trade secrets and trademarks. These actions range from domestic Lanham Act suits to international trademark oppositions to proactive steps such as organizing raids against counterfeiters in China and other countries. Assisted by our network of foreign attorneys and agents, we prosecute trademarks worldwide. Using our automated trademark management system, we track literally thousands of marks with registrations in virtually every country. With these resources, Freeborn & Peters is able to quickly and efficiently assess the strength of a trademark, perform clearance searches, secure protection, and defend these rights in any forum.
Our attorneys are also adept at foiling cyber squatters who attempt to use our clients’ brands or names in infringing domain names. We advise clients on the best practices for protecting the confidentiality, integrity and availability of their electronic information and networks against threats posed by hackers, disgruntled employees, and corporate espionage agents. Our services include security audits and risk assessments, security and data storage policy creation and implementation, e-commerce content liability advice, and techniques for responding effectively when intrusions do occur.
Our Technology Saves Costs
We believe that efficient discovery tools are critical for any serious litigation firm. The discovery process generates the majority of legal fees in virtually every litigation case. According to industry sources, e-mail review and analysis alone can account for 20% to 50% of the total case costs and run into the millions of dollars. Law Journal Newsletters -- Legal Tech Newsletter, Volume 24, Number 7 (October, 2006, ALM Properties, Inc.). But, as headlines have repeatedly shown, just one key e-mail message can have a significant impact on the outcome of litigation.
Freeborn & Peters lawyers have been leaders in solving these problems for years. The challenge faced by every law firm is how to control the ballooning costs of discovery while also recovering the critical information. Because document intensive litigation has long been one of our core capabilities, Freeborn & Peters has in-house systems to cost effectively and successfully manage both paper and electronic discovery.
Since the early 1990’s, Freeborn & Peters has operated its own multi-million page image library capable of locating and grouping relevant documents quickly using key text passages extracted through Optical Character Recognition techniques instead of expensive and inaccurate manual coding. The necessary infrastructure investments have been made. For example, our reviewers regularly use dual monitors to simultaneously work with both the document image and the database, greatly increasing the speed and lowering the cost of the document review process.
We also have our own E-Discovery Lab where we process mailstores and electronic documents. We use metadata and text to eliminate duplicate messages and reconstruct e-mail strings in a series of automated processing steps which occur before lawyers begin their review. Firms who lack our capabilities must hire expensive vendors, greatly increasing their clients’ costs. For example, in December, 2006 and January, 2007 we processed and reassembled 250 gigabytes of e-mails from back up tapes for approximately $56,000 when outside vendors quoted over $375,000 for the same service.
We have skilled Litigation Technology professionals on staff. We employ consultants for the actual on-site harvesting of data or imaging and OCR processing of documents. Thereafter, we do not charge clients for the processing or storage of data or for our infrastructure. We charge only for the professional services provided to each client by our litigation team’s lawyers, paralegals and Litigation Technology professionals. Our system is remotely and securely available to support co-counsel and in-house counsel.
