Adrian M. Pruetz

To gain an edge for her clients, Pruetz has a knack for picking up on the latest precedents. More than once, she said, she’s rewritten a brief late at night after realizing a related case had just been decided and could be used as leverage.

“My strategy has always been to have an evolving strategy,” Pruetz said. “There are very few cases I have handled over my career where the facts didn’t change from what everybody thought on Day One.”

When the Supreme Court decision in TC Heartland LLC v. Kraft Foods Group Brands LLC, 2017 DJDAR 4633, Pruetz had two cases pending in the Eastern District of Texas. The decision placed limits on where plaintiffs may bring patent infringement cases, which Pruetz immediately picked up as noteworthy for her client Vizio Inc., a software manufacturer based in Irvine, and made a motion to transfer a patent infringement suit. Blue Spike LLC. v. VIZIO Inc., 17-00060 (E.D. Tex., filed Jan. 30, 2017). The case is now pending in the Central District of California. Blue Spike LLC v. VIZIO Inc., 17-cv-01172 (C.D. Cal., filed July 10, 2017).

“Whatever stage of the case, whenever you’re preparing a submission you always have to be paying attention to what’s happening because the law changes all the time,” Pruetz said. “You are responsible for knowing that and for altering whatever you’re writing to the new standard.”

Pruetz’s path to the courtroom was off script from the beginning. She describes her education as “disruptive”: She married during college and quickly started a family. Needing to support the family, she took jobs as a loan officer and then took over an accounting department for a chain of home centers. Ultimately, she went to law school, inspired in part by popular courtroom TV shows.

“After our family was complete, I thought to myself, ‘If all of this hadn’t happened, what would I have done?’” Pruetz recalled. “I’d always admired trial lawyers and I thought the law would be most interesting to me. I wasn’t wrong.”

— Paula Lehman-Ewing