Trend Micro’s Complete Victory Against Intellectual Ventures Enhanced by Partial Award of Legal Fees

September 05, 2017

Palo Alto – Paul Hastings LLP, a leading global law firm, and client Trend Micro, a global leader in security software and solutions, announced today that the remaining issue of attorneys’ fees from its high-stakes litigation against Intellectual Ventures (IV) is coming to a close with another victory for Trend.

Ruling from the bench on August 31, 2017, U.S. District Judge Leonard P. Stark granted Trend Micro’s motion for attorneys’ fees, ordering IV to pay Trend Micro’s legal fees based on an “unusual” circumstance of IV’s expert witness admitting to changing his opinion for the first time during trial against co-defendant Symantec (just months before Trend Micro's trial), and IV’s subsequent and repeated failed efforts to convince the Court that the admitted changed testimony was somehow simply a “mistake" or that the expert was incorrect in admitting he changed his testimony.

Judge Stark’s ruling closes the final chapter of this seven-year-long battle with IV, which sought approximately $150 million in damages. IV initially sued Trend Micro in 2010 for infringing patents ’050, which describes methods of screening emails and other data files for unwanted content and ’142, which describes an “automated post office” method of analyzing email to filter unsafe messages.

While a jury trial found Symantec infringed these patents in 2015, with $17 million in damages awarded, Paul Hastings represented Trend Micro before the U.S. District Court of Delaware, winning a complete victory in 2015 without the burden of a trial. Judge Stark granted summary judgment, ruling that the patents asserted by IV are unpatentable under Section 101 of the Patent Act and the U.S. Supreme Court’s Alice decision, which held that abstract ideas implemented using a computer cannot be patented.

On September 30, 2016, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed the Delaware federal judge’s ruling that the patents were invalid for claiming abstract ideas.

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