Our first runner-up this week is the Goodwin Procter team led by partners Doug Kline and Robert Frederickson, who on March 19 won a $308.5 patent infringement verdict for Personalized Media Communications against Apple in the Eastern District of Texas. PMC accused Apple’s FairPlay digital rights management technology which iTunes and the App Store use to decrypt content like movies, music, and apps of infringing claims of its 2012 encryption patent. Apple succeeded in invalidating the asserted claims at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, but the Goodwin team got most of that decision reversed on appeal. The jury trial, one of the first held since the Eastern District suspended trials due to the pandemic, began on March 15. The Goodwin team at trial also included J. Anthony Downs, Kevin Martin, Lana Shiferman, Sarah Fischer, Andrew Ong, Alexandra Valenti, Naomi Birbach and Autumn Soucy.
Mayer Brown partner John Nadolenco gets a runner-up nod for his work in an 11-year battle involving one of Hong Kong’s wealthiest families. This week Nadolenco scored a $69 million judgment for the firm’s client, Rostack Investments Inc. The case involved a $30 million loan that Rostack made to its deceased founder’s daughter, Angela Sabella, who claimed her father gifted her the funds via a hand-written note at a family meeting on February 8, 2005. During a nine-day bench trial in Los Angeles Superior Court, Nadolenco proved that no family meeting occurred on that date since a key participant was 7,000 miles away at the time. When Sabella tried to change her story claiming the meeting took place a day earlier, the Mayer Brown team was able to show that her father’s writing had been on the underlying document since at least November 2003. The trial court concluded Sabella was not credible due to “multiple drastic and contradictory changes in testimony” and this week entered judgment for Rostack for the principal sum of $28 million plus $41 million interest.
