Jeffrey M. Fisher

Fisher has made a bit of a specialty of fighting technology giants in court.

He took on two of them last year while representing BladeRoom Group Ltd. in a lawsuit last year. Facebook settled the case four days into trial, but Fisher went on to win $60 million in damages against Emerson Electric Co., a 77,000-employee engineering and manufacturing company. BladeRoom Group Limited et al. v. Facebook Inc. et al., 15-CV01370 (N.D. Cal., filed March 23, 2015).

“They had come out to meet with BladeRoom under the guise of an acquisition in 2011 and 2012,” Fisher said. “Emerson was not interested in an acquisition but instead using BladeRoom technology to build a massive data center for Facebook in Sweden.”

The trick in “David versus Goliath” cases, he said, is finding a small company that can tell a “compelling story” about how they were wronged — something UK-based BladeRoom provided in spades.

But Fisher also represents big companies, as he did for client Adobe Systems Inc. against a patent holding company. Blue Spike v. Adobe Systems Inc., 14-CV01647 (N.D. Cal., filed Aug. 22, 2012).

In 2014, his team got the case transferred out of the Eastern District of Texas, known for being friendly to plaintiffs. Last year, he got all of the plaintiff’s claims dismissed with prejudice.

In June, he is scheduled to go trial for a startup in litigation against Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. The case involves Huawei’s misappropriation and breach of contract claims around a computer memory technology called solid state drive controllers, as well as CNEX Labs Inc.’s counterclaims. Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. v. CNEX Labs, Inc. et al., 17-CV00893 (E.D. Tex., filed Dec. 28, 2017).

“Obviously Huawei has been in the news quite a bit for doing what we allege they have done to CNEX in this case, which is taking intellectual property,” said Fisher, who chairs the Technology Industry Group at Farella Braun + Martel in San Francisco.

“It’s a nice mix of smaller and larger companies, which keeps the practice interesting,” Fisher said.

— Malcolm Maclachlan