Marvell Wins Patent Case Brought by Lake Cherokee HDD Technologies

Fish & Richardson won a take-nothing defense verdict for Marvell Semiconductor, Inc. (MSI) in a patent case brought by non-practicing entity Lake Cherokee HDD Technologies, LLC. 

On August 16, 2013, a jury in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Marshall Division (with judge Gilstrap presiding), found no infringement of two patents originated by Cirrus Logic, Inc. and later purchased by Lake Cherokee pertaining to HDD read channel technology that is not practiced by any of MSI’s chips. 

Lake Cherokee had asked for nearly ten figures in damages.
 
Lake Cherokee sued MSI and six other companies, including LSI Corp., in June 2010 accusing them of infringing its patents. All of the other defendants either settled with Lake Cherokee or were otherwise released from the case before trial.
 
Fish & Richardson principals Ruffin Cordell and Indranil ‘Indy’ Mukerji served as co-lead counsel for MSI.
 
"This was a huge victory for our client MSI.  From day one, we knew that this case entailed challenging infringement questions in a very complicated technical space, but we had confidence in our case," said Cordell.

"This was a high stakes, hard-fought case that involved dozens of witnesses and millions of pages of documents," added Mukerji. "We are grateful that the court and the jury took the time to parse the issues to reach the correct result in this very challenging legal and factual case."