Our first runners-up this week are Morgan Chu and his team at Irell & Manella who brought home a $948.8 million damages verdict for VLSI Technology LLC in its third West Texas patent trial showdown over computer processing technology with Intel Corp. You might remember Chu and partners Ben Hattenbach and Alan Heinrich took home Litigator of the Week honors back in March 2021 after landing a whopping $2.175 billion patent infringement verdict against Intel. In the April 2022 rematch, Bill Lee, Mindy Sooter and Joseph Mueller of Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr landed LOTW honors for scoring a complete defense verdict for Intel. After a six-day trial in this go-round, jurors in Austin, Texas, found that Intel’s Cascade Lake and Skylake microprocessors violated VLSI patents related to data processing and that those patents were valid. Along with Chu, Hattenbach and Heinrich, the Irell team included Amy Proctor, Thomas Barr, Ian Washburn, Keith Orso, Charlotte Wen, Benjamin Manzin-Monnin, Jordan Nafekh, Theresa Vellek and Emily Grant.
Runners-up honors also go to a team at Covington & Burling that got a trial court win for AbbVie affiliate Pharmacyclics LLC to stand up at the Federal Circuit. Covington’s Christopher Sipes, Erica Andersen and Brianne Bharkhda previously were named Litigators of the Week back in August 2021 after U.S. District Judge Colm Connolly found patents behind Imbruvica, a cancer treatment that generated $9 billion in worldwide sales last year, valid and infringed. The Federal Circuit this week affirmed the rulings regarding the four patents, the last of which won’t expire until 2036. Along with Sipes, Andersen and Bharkhda, the Covington team also included Nick Evoy, Brad Ervin and Laura Dolbow. Dolbow has taken a position as a Sharswood Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School while the appeal was pending.
