Patent defendants trust Indranil “Indy” Mukerji, including about a third of the 150 defendants sued by Parallel Networks LLC in a recent patent infringement case in the Eastern District of Texas. The Fish & Richardson Washington partner was tapped as co-lead lawyer for Google Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., and he also represented 46 other defendants in the case Parallel brought over its client-server communication method patent. The defendants won by summary judgment in August.
The patent reform law passed in September sharply restricts lawsuits against multiple defendants, but Mukerji believes that courts will still run joint pretrial proceedings when plaintiffs sue numerous defendants about the same patent. “There’s still going to have to be a lot of coordination among defendants.” Mukerji’s other recent high-profile patent work includes co-representing Marvell Semiconductor Inc. and Microsoft Corp. in separate Eastern District of Texas declaratory judgment actions against Australian government research arm Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, which demanded licenses for its WiFi-related patent. Mukerji helped settle the cases just before trial. “Effectively defending against those sorts of claims against an entire industry is really critical,” Mukerji said.
