Our lead runner-up spot this week goes to a team of Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath intellectual property litigators led by partners David Gross and Chad Drown. After a two-week patent infringement trial in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, jurors returned a non-infringement verdict in less than a day for Faegre’s client Seagate. Jurors found that Seagate didn’t infringe any of the 10 claims brought by a company founded by former Carnegie Mellon University professor accusing Seagate of infringing a patent for certain magnetic structures that can be used in writing data to hard drives. The Faegre Drinker team representing Seagate also included Kevin Wagner, Kate Razavi, Helen Chacon, Luke Tomsich, Kelly Fermoyle, Kirsten Elfstrand and paralegal Shelley Meyer.
Also getting a runner-up nod this week are Renita Sharma, Corey Worcester and Terry Wit of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan. The Ninth Circuit this week sided with their client hiQ Labs in a long-running dispute over the data analytics company’s mining of information from publicly available LinkedIn profiles. In a case on remand from the U.S. Supreme Court, the court held that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the federal anti-hacking statute which prohibits unauthorized access to computer systems, shouldn’t apply to websites that are open to the public. The decision upholds a preliminary injunction forbidding LinkedIn from denying hiQ access to publicly available member profiles. “It is likely that when a computer network generally permits public access to its data, a user’s accessing that publicly available data will not constitute access without authorization under the CFAA,” wrote Ninth Circuit Judge Marsha Berzon. Sharma argued the case for hiQ at the Ninth Circuit.
