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Microsoft Ordered to Pay $200 Million in Patent Dispute
The American Lawyer
May 21, 2009
Recently, the Eastern District of Texas' reputation as a plaintiff-friendly jurisdiction has taken a few hits. Well, here's some news that will help restore its standing: a federal jury in Tyler, Texas, has ordered Microsoft to pay $200 million to Canadian software company i4i for patent infringement. Here's the story from Bloomberg.
Douglas Cawley of McKool Smith, who represented i4i at the six-day trial, told us that he asked the jury to award his client between $200 and $207 million. He also said that the jury found the infringement to be willful, which gives Tyler, Texas, federal district court Judge Leonard Davis the discretion to treble the damages. That determination is weeks away, said Cawley. Microsoft was represented by Matthew Powers of Weil, Gotshal & Manges.
Cawley told us the dispute is over Microsoft Word's use of "extensible markup language" to process electronic documents. Cawley said he presented evidence that Microsoft knew about i4i's patent but didn't try to avoid infringement.
Microsoft, not surprisingly, said it will appeal. "We believe the evidence clearly demonstrated that we do not infringe and that the i4i patent is invalid," said Microsoft spokesperson David Bowermaster in a statement. "We believe this award of damages is legally and factually unsupported, so we will ask the court to overturn the verdict."
We e-mailed Weil's Powers for comment, but didn't hear back immediately.
Associated Press reports contributed to this story.
This article first appeared on The Am Law Litigation Daily blog on AmericanLawyer.com.
