In the second half of the patent law panel, there were two main areas that I found interesting. The first is that at least two out the four judges on the panel think that e-discovery is huge problem. One of the judges said that one of the biggest issues is that as the judge in the case, he knows the least about the case. Due to this, he doesn’t know what is proper in a discovery motion and what isn’t. This can led to burdensome requests for one party. However, he did say that he relook at costs at end of trial and if the information asked for isn’t used, he takes this into account when awarding costs!
The second thing that was interesting was the statistics mentioned by Judge Boyland about the District of Colorado. He said that while patent law cases are hard to settle because there is a lot at stake, they almost always settle. In addition, he said the top three verdicts in Colorado in the last 8 years involved IP cases. The largest verdict was 51million in a patent law case! This was followed by 41.9million trade secret case and a 15million trademark case. (However, the average settlements are much less with 500k in a patent case, 38k in a copyright case, and 90k in a trademark case.)
As I neither litigate nor practice patent law, I am looking forward to the next panel much more as it deals with a subject I love – social media! As I mentioned in a prior post, I have done several presentations on the subject recently (online marketing law for small businesses, social media issues for human resource professionals, and online marketing for attorneys) and can’t wait to see what other lawyers have to say about the matter!
