In a win for Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, a federal district court jury in Tyler, Tx., determined Monday that T-Mobile USA Inc. doesn’t infringe patents owned by Realtime Data LLC. After securing settlements with other defendants in the case, including AT&T Inc. and Sprint Nextel Corp., Realtime Data and its lawyers at Cooley had sought $265 million in damages from T-Mobile.
Realtime Data, which also does business as IXO, owns more than 20 patents relating to compression-based data acceleration. A Manhattan-based inventor named James F. Fallon founded the company in 1998, with the help of two former litigators at Weil, Gotshal & Manges, Richard Tashjian and Jerry Padian.
In the last few years, Realtime Data has filed a slew of infringement complaints down in Tyler. One of set of complaints from 2009 targeted financial institutions like NYSE Euronext Inc. and Morgan Stanley, which compress data when communicating market information. In 2010, Realtime Data also went after six wireless companies–T-Mobile, AT&T, Sprint, MetroPCS Communications Inc., Verizon Wireless, and Cricket Communication–that compress data on their wireless networks.
The wireless defendants all settled prior to trial except for T-Mobile. In November 2012, three months before the case went before the jury, T-Mobile brought on a Gibson Dunn team led by Josh Krevitt to head up the trial, joining the company’s lawyers at SNR Denton and the Atlanta-based firm Smith Risley Tempel Santos. T-Mobile’s local counsel was Thad Heartfield, a former judge in the district. The trial kicked off on Feb. 4 before Judge Ron Clark and ended Feb. 11. Cooley partners Wayne Stacy and Thomas Friel represented RealTime Data, along with local counsel Michael Smith of Siebman Burg Phillips & Smith.
The verdict came after less than two hours of deliberation, and it was a slam dunk for T-Mobile. The jury found that the wireless providers didn’t infringe any of the asserted claims of the three patents at issue, and also concluded that all three patents were invalid on obviousness grounds.
The win for T-Mobile comes on the heels of a major loss for RealTime Data in its cases against Wall Street institutions. Those cases were transferred to U.S. district court in Manhattan and consolidated before Judge Katherine Forrest, who gutted the case on summary judgment in September, as we reported here.
Krevitt of Gibson Dunn was not immediately available for comment. We also didn’t hear back from Cooley’s Friel.
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported that Gibson Dunn replaced SNR Denton to serve as sole counsel in the case. We regret the error.
