Between our winner and these first two runners-up, we can safely say that it’s been a big couple of weeks in the patent world.
First up, a team of heavy hitters representing Qualcomm scored a huge win at the Ninth Circuit on August 11 that vacated U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh’s judgment in favor of the Federal Trade Commission in its antitrust case targeting the company’s licensing practices. The ruling reversed a permanent, worldwide injunction and, as my colleague Scott Graham wrote, provided “vindication” for the in-house lawyers who had been labelled as the “architects” of an anticompetitive licensing campaign in Koh’s May 2019 order. Tom Goldstein of Goldstein & Russell handled Ninth Circuit arguments for Qualcomm’s team which included lawyers from Cravath Swaine & Moore, Keker, Van Nest & Peters, Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati.
