Olivia M. Kim

Judge Gregory M. Sleet developed a reputation in Delaware federal court over the years for a fabled reluctance to grant summary judgments of noninfringement in intellectual property cases. In the last 15 years, he’s only considered five in patent cases and hadn’t granted a single one for noninfringement — until Kim made her case on behalf of clients Charles Schwab & Co. Inc. and Bloomberg L.P.

Quest Licensing Co. had filed a lawsuit over her client’s real-time stock market update programs, which they claimed violated their patent infringed on their patent for an information exchange method. Quest Licensing Corp. v. Bloomberg L.P. et al., CV14-00561-GMS (D. Del. Jan. 19, 2017).

Kim said Quest’s patent was developed to counter bandwidth problems typical of mobile networks in the early 2000s. A solution they found was to only send information that had been changed — sending updated pricing information through a stock exchange app, for example, but not resending a stock symbol that consumers had already received in a previous update.

But the information present in the apps put out by Charles Schwab and Bloomberg are retransmitted, Kim said, even the stock symbols the patented system would theoretically block. Not looking to complicate the matter before Sleet, Kim said she made a to-the-point argument based on that fact.

“We tried to make it as simple as possible for the judge to look at and see there’s no dispute. The plaintiff could not dispute that we send the symbol information all the time,” Kim said. “The key to winning this was to make the summary judgment as simple as possible, and bringing one very simple issue to the fore.”

With a coast-to-coast IP practice that regularly brings her to some of the country’s busiest IP-oriented districts, including the Northern District of California, the Eastern District of Texas, and the District of Delaware, Kim said she looks for creative solutions to cater each case to the client and the courtroom.

“Every client is different, and every case is different based on the circumstances,” Kim said. “So we need to know what the client’s needs are, what are the goals, what are they looking for? Working with our clients is how we get the best results possible.”

— Steven Crighton