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.
The case settled before the expert reports on infringement were due, apparently quite favourably to our side, though one usually doesn't hear the details.