Viewing posts for the category Expert Witness Cases
This was a patent and trade secret case concerning lidar (laser radar) technology for self-driving cars and trucks. It was the biggest case I've worked on, with potential damages over $2 billion, and also one of the most fun. I was the defendant's expert on the patent side, and we beat Google--they dropped all their patent assertions. (This was made a lot easier by the fact that Uber wasn't infringing, of course.)
In the spring of 2017, I was approached by lawyers from two technology companies working in civil avionics (instruments for airplanes). I can't say who they were due to NDA restrictions, but the job was an unusual and interesting one. The two companies had been joint development partners, but the relationship had soured and trust had now broken down completely. Both were concerned that the other was misusing intellectual property disclosed during the joint venture, and they asked me to do do an audit to see whether this was in fact true. The situation was made more complicated because one company was several hundred times as large as the other, and of course there was no court-ordered discovery and no one was under oath.
Testifying defense expert representing Samsung in an action for patent infringement concerning optical storage, holographic optical elements, tracking servos, and signal integrity.
This was another fun one with a lot of reverse engineering. This time round I was working with the plaintiff, Industrial Technology Research Institute, which is a research lab owned by the Taiwanese government. It was an action for patent infringement in the focusing and tracking servos of optical disc drives, as well as in the arrangement of the laser sources. The patent claims at issue concerned the way the magnetic "voice coil" actuators simultaneously adjusted focus, tracking, and tilt, so I needed to take several of the accused products apart and run the head servos by themselves in my lab. I also had to cut apart some of the coils to show how they were wired, and decap the lasers to show that there were two chips side-by-side in the CD/DVD source and one in the BluRay source.
Testifying expert representing ThinkOptics in an action for patent infringement concerning video games, specifically the human interface of the Nintendo Wii.
February 15, 2015: Settled after an inter partes re-examination.