Our first runners-up this week are Sam Stake, Robert Stone and Mike Powell of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan who landed a $174.5 million patent infringement verdict against Meta Platforms and its Instagram subsidiary for client Voxer. A federal jury in Austin, Texas this week found that the defendants infringed two patents for livestreaming technology held by Voxer, which released its walkie talkie app in 2011. The jury also found that the Voxer patents, which were developed by the company founder Tom Katis to deal with battlefield communications problems he encountered while serving in Afghanistan, were valid.
Runners-up honors also go to Ilann Maazel and Debbie Greenberger of Emery Celli Brinckerhoff Abady Ward & Maazel. The Sixth Circuit this week revived claims brought on behalf of former students at the Ohio State University who say they were abused between 1978 and 1998 by Dr. Richard Strauss, a university physician and athletic team doctor who is now dead. U.S. District Judge Michael Watson in Columbus found last year that Title IX claims that the school was deliberately indifferent to the plaintiffs’ heightened risk of abuse were time-barred. But Circuit Judge Karen Nelson Moore wrote for the divided panel this week that the plaintiffs “plausibly allege a decades-long cover up” and “adequately allege that they did not know and could not reasonably have known that Ohio State injured them until 2018,” the year the school commissioned an independent investigation into the Strauss case by Perkins Coie. Maazel argued the appeal for the plaintiffs at the Sixth Circuit. The team representing the plaintiffs also includes Marissa Benavides at ECBAWM, Adele Kimmel and Alexandra Brodsky at Public Justice, and attorney Scott Smith in Columbus, Ohio.
