William F. Abrams

In Abrams’ line of work, many times the significant thing is what doesn’t happen.

“Sometimes when you don’t have a lot of trials it means you’re really good because you’re able to reach resolution without having to go through that,” said Abrams, who joined Steptoe & Johnson in 2014 and launched the firm’s Palo Alto office.

“A lot of what I do is invisible to everybody except my clients because I am counseling people behind the scenes,” Abrams said.

A big example of that was a settlement Abrams achieved in a major, multi-pronged trade litigations case brought by SanDisk and Toshiba Corp. Abrams was retained to defend SK Hynix Inc., a South Korean company that is the world’s second-largest memory chipmaker. The matter included a lawsuit for theft of trade secrets brought by SanDisk in San Jose U.S. District Court and a companion action brought against SK Hynix by Toshiba in Japan, where Steptoe coordinated with Japanese counsel. The Toshiba matter settled in December 2014, and in 2015 SK Hynix reached a successful settlement with SanDisk. SanDisk Corp. v. SK Hynix Inc., 2014-14-CV-262078 (Santa Clara Super. Ct. 2015).

“It was one of the biggest trade secret cases in the last five to 10 years,” said Abrams, who couldn’t comment on the confidential settlement.

He’s also defended Google Inc. from an infringement lawsuit by an Israeli company over system updates, winning at the trial court and federal court level.

Today Abrams sees a lot less patent cases than four or five years ago, mostly due to U.S. Supreme Court decisions that have made it more difficult to successfully sue for patent infringement. The passage of the America Invents Act also made it possible to challenge patents within the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office instead of court, Abrams said.

But there are more trade secrets cases today, spurred by an explosion of startups in the Bay Area. “We have a very mobile workforce. People go from one company to another,” said Abrams.

— Justin Kloczko