Top Plaintiffs' Verdict by Dollar: Asbaghi v. Nydegger, $46 million

Accidental medical needle sticks can transmit disease, draw blood and cause pain. One estimate holds there are as many as 600,000 accidental stick injuries annually in the U.S. So inventor Hooman A. Asbaghi came up with a protective device for injection or aspiration needles that involved self-sheathing the barrel with a telescopically sliding sleeve that eliminates sticks after the needle is withdrawn from the patient.

Asbaghi hired patent lawyer Neil K. Nydegger to acquire for the device what the device offers patients: protection. Nydegger obtained Patent No. 6,530,905 on March 11, 2003. But when the patent maintenance fee of $685 was about to come due in 2006, Asbaghi accidentally put an X in the wrong box on a reminder letter from Nydegger instructing the lawyer, "Please do not pay the maintenance fee and allow this case to go abandoned." That conflicted with the $685 check Asbaghi sent when he returned the reminder letter to Nydegger, but Nydegger's secretary ignored the conflict, deposited the check and let the patent expire.

The error went unnoticed until 2011, when a medical device maker sought to license Asbaghi's invention, set aside $80 million to $90 million for royalty payments ? and learned through a due diligence search that the patent was no longer in force. That scuttled the deal. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office ruled that the error, though unintentional, was avoidable and rejected Nydegger's petition to revive the patent. Asbaghi retained Daryoosh Khashayar to sue Nydegger for professional negligence.

"Their defense was that they followed Mr. Asbaghi's instructions," Khashayar said. "Our experts said that an attorney must check with his client before allowing a patent to go abandoned. Even Mr. Nydegger under my cross-examination acknowledged that he would have checked, but he had given his secretary authority to close case files without checking with him or any other lawyer in his office. His secretary was handling everything."

Khashayar said that defense witnesses at a jury trial testified the invention was not valuable, but a representative of the device maker that planned to buy the invention made it clear just how much money the mistake cost Asbaghi. The jury ruled that Asbaghi was 25 percent at fault for checking the wrong box, but that still left Asbaghi with more than $46 million. "The post-trial tentative rulings were in our favor, and the case settled for an confidential amount," avoiding an appeal, Khashayar said. "My client is very happy. It was the biggest single case verdict in recent San Diego history."

— John Roemer