Law Firms
Judge Says HP Lawyers Didn’t Go Beyond ‘Bounds of Civility’
Posted May 22, 2009, 08:31 am CST
By Debra Cassens Weiss
A federal judge has refused to order lawyers for Hewlett-Packard Co. to pay about $12 million in attorney fees in a hard-fought patent infringement case.
Judge Randall Rader wrote that some HP lawyers “did employ some marginally vexatious litigation tactics," but the conduct did not warrant the fee sanction, the New York Law Journal reports. Rader is a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit who was sitting by designation in the case.
"Litigation by its nature is adversarial,” Rader wrote. "Clients seek, and, in fact, deserve zealous advocacy. Taking all of the allegations of litigation misconduct as true for purposes of this motion, this court finds that actions of Hewlett-Packard's counsel did not stretch beyond the bounds of civility."
The story identifies HP’s lead trial counsel as John Allcock of DLA Piper, and its other firms as Harter, Secrest & Emery of Rochester. N.Y., and Fish & Richardson.
Cornell had sued HP for infringing a patent that allowed computers to process information faster and obtained a $184 million award, later reduced to $53 million. Cornell had claimed through its lawyers at Sidley Austin that HP lawyers contested almost all of its discovery motions and tried to drag out the litigation past February 2006 when its patent expired.
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