Pryor Cashman Awarded $750,000 in Attorney's Fees For Successful Defense of Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake in U.S. Patent Case
U.S. District Court Judge Manuel Real of the Central District of California awarded over $750,000 in attorneys’ fees, costs, and expenses to Pryor Cashman clients Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears, Tennman Entertainment, LLC and Spears King Pole Inc. (“Defendants”), all of whom were defendants in a patent infringement dispute that Judge Real dismissed with prejudice on June 16, 2015. The case was commenced in 2011.
To learn more about the underlying case and Judge Real’s decision, please click here.
Attorneys’ fees in patent infringement disputes are awarded only in “exceptional” cases. Judge Real determined that plaintiff Large Audience Display Systems, LLC (LADS) had engaged in behavior that was “sufficiently extraordinary to warrant an award of attorneys’ fees, costs, and expenses.”
In reaching his determination, Judge Real relied on a number of LADS’s many acts of misconduct throughout its lawsuit against Defendants. One cited example was that the LADS LLC had been created as a shell entity with the seemed sole purpose of manufacturing jurisdiction and venue in the Eastern District of Texas (an allegedly patent plaintiff-friendly court). As a result of LADS’s manufactured jurisdiction, Defendants were forced to incur substantial attorneys’ fees just to transfer the case to the proper venue, namely, the Central District of California.
Judge Real also noted that LADS intentionally prolonged the inter partes reexamination of LADS’s U.S. Patent No. 6,669,346 (the patent in suit)—a reexamination which nevertheless resulted in the U.S. Patent Office holding invalid every one of the patent claims that LADS had asserted was infringed by Defendants. Even after losing before a unanimous Appellate Board of the Patent Office, LADS moved to re-open discovery in its federal court action against Defendants so that it could consider asserting additional patent claims from among the original claims of the patent, although those were not previously asserted as having been infringed in the several opportunities LADS had to assert the same. Judge Real denied LADS’s attempt to fish for evidence, and instead dismissed the case with prejudice. The Court also considered the various definitions propounded by LADS for words of the claims of the patent, trying to save the validity of the patent in the reexamination, to be “disingenuous at the very least.”
Another factor cited by Judge Real in his Decision holding the case to be “exceptional” was the fact that LADS, in its opposition to Defendants’ motion for attorneys’ fees, breached the Canons of Ethics as it sought to rely on an attorney-client communication clearly inadvertently disclosed by Defendants. Judge Real noted that LADS’s clear violation of “important canons of professionalism” starkly “underscored the types of actions [LADS] has taken in this case.”
Defendants were awarded the entirety of their attorneys’ fees accrued in connection with LADS’s frivolous action, from inception to dismissal, including those expenses associated with the inter partes reexamination.
The Pryor Cashman team was comprised of Partner Andrew Langsam, a member of Pryor Cashman’s IP and Litigation Groups, Partner Brad D. Rose, chair of Pryor Cashman’s Intellectual Property Group, Partner Michael Niborski, a member of Pryor Cashman's IP and Litigation Groups and Litigation Associate Dasha Chestukhin.
To read Judge Real’s decision in the case of Large Audience Display Systems, LLC v. Tennman Productions, LLC, Justin Timberlake, Spears King Pole, Inc., and Britney Spears (civil case no. 2:11-cv-03398), please click here. This decision was reported in the August 20, 2015 edition of Law360. To read the article, please click here.
