Ask the people working at the bars, restaurants, and hotels of Marshall, Texas, about April 13, 2006-the day TiVo Inc. won a $73.9 million patent infringement verdict against EchoStar Communications Corporation-and they’ll reminisce about a river of money the way managers at Macy’s talk about Christmas. To them, it didn’t matter which side TiVo was on, only that Marshall was sharing in the good fortune of the patent litigants who came to their courthouse and lavished money on their town. The first thing one TiVo lawyer from Irell & Manella asked after the jury came back was the location of the nearest bar, so the celebration could begin.
The joyous mood, however, wasn’t shared by all. While the Irell lawyers partied at OS2 Restaurant & Pub, Marshall’s one downtown bar, EchoStar’s lawyers from Morrison & Foerster straggled out of the town’s small federal courthouse and returned to the Comfort Suites hotel, where the lawyers drank and watched cartoons. The looming question wasn’t just how they could have suffered such a devastating loss-Marshall was, after all, part of a plaintiff-friendly district once described by U.S. Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia as “a renegade jurisdiction”-but how they could prevent it from happening again: MoFo partner Rachel Krevans was scheduled to return to the Eastern District of Texas in early 2007 to defend EchoStar against Forgent Networks, Inc.’s $200 million patent claim.