The year and a half Laura Schumacher spent on the wrong side of a $1.67 billion verdict is not a period she’d like to relive. The Abbott Laboratories general counsel had anticipated that her team might lose the patent trial in the plaintiff-friendly Eastern District of Texas. But the sting of the verdict wasn’t something that Schumacher or any of her lawyers had seen coming. “I don’t think that we anticipated how it would actually feel to lose a verdict of that size,” says Schumacher, Abbott’s GC since 2005.
After the trial, Schumacher was as confident as ever that the merits of the case were on Abbott’s side. Her lawyers understood the patent, and they had been involved every step of the way in developing case strategy. There was a lot on the line for the legal team, but they dusted themselves off and filed an appeal.
