O’Melveny Secures Unanimous Victory for Google at the Federal Circuit

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SAN FRANCISCO—April 21, 2023—O’Melveny recently helped secure a victory for Google at the Federal Circuit, which unanimously reversed a district court’s judgment against Google concerning three patents that Plaintiffs asserted against the company’s Chrome web browser.

Issued on April 18, the decision comes after a long running patent litigation dispute that began nearly a decade ago. The case, Alfonso Cioffi et al. v. Google LLC, was filed in 2013 in the Eastern District of Texas by Texas-based plaintiffs, Alfonso Cioffi (the patents’ coinventor) and the daughters of the deceased coinventor Allen Rozman.

In 2017, a jury entered a verdict in favor of plaintiffs and awarded US$20 million in past damages. . In 2018, the O’Melveny team secured a post-trial victory from the Eastern District of Texas court, after the court found that it had erred by sending Google’s § 251 defenses to the jury. The court vacated the jury verdict and granted a new bench trial based on the § 251 defenses. The bench trial, however, concluded in favor of plaintiffs.

On appeal to the Federal Circuit, Google, represented by O’Melveny and appellate counsel at Perkins Coie, argued that the district court erred in its analysis of the original patent and recapture defenses. Two weeks after the oral argument, the Federal Circuit sided with Google, issuing a unanimous decision reversing the district court’s findings and finding all three patents invalid under the original patent requirement.

The O’Melveny team was led by partners Darin Snyder, Luann Simmons, David Almeling, and Mark Liang.

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