J. David Hadden

The California legal profession almost lost one of its most influential patent litigators to academia.

After finishing an undergraduate degree in physics at Yale College, a young J. David Hadden decided he hadn’t had enough and began a Ph.D. program in theoretical physics at Princeton University.

Luckily for future clients like Amazon.com Inc., Intel Corp., Under Armour Inc. and Zillow Group Inc., Hadden took a different route.

He returned home to Ventura and became involved briefly in motorcycle racing before scoring a perfect LSAT and returning to Yale for a law degree.

“At that point I figured, given the technical physics background I had, IP law made sense,” Hadden said. “It worked out.”

Over the course of the last year, the San Francisco attorney has won four cases for clients at the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

But Hadden has been busy in the trial courts too.

In March 2018, he and a team of Fenwick lawyers were able to have three patents invalidated on behalf of Amazon.com, helping to protect Alexa, the company’s talking speaker system. IPA Technologies Inc. v. Amazon Inc., 16-CV01266 (D. Del., filed Dec. 19, 2016)

“We filed motions to invalidate those based on Alice,” Hadden said, referencing the landmark 2014 U.S. Supreme Court decision clarifying patent eligibility. Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International, 573 U.S. 208, 134 S. Ct. 2347 (2014).

Also advocating for Amazon, Hadden filed a declaratory judgment against Australian company Global Equity Management, which sued dozens of the online marketplace’s corporate users such as Netflix Inc. and General Electric Co. Hadden was ultimately able to win dismissal of the 21 patent infringement cases brought by Global Equity Management. Amazon Web Services Inc. et al., v. Global Equity Management (SA) Pty. Ltd., 16-CV00619 (E.D. Va., filed July 22, 2016).

“It’s really Amazon stepping up and protecting its customers against these patent claims that touch on Amazon’s AWS service, which almost every major company uses in some variety,” Hadden said.

Now, he’s turning to defend a patent infringement case against client Netflix brought by Realtime Adaptive Streaming LLC, which has a history of suing companies in the video space and data compression areas. U.S. Magistrate Judge Sherry R. Fallon issued a tentative ruling finding in partial favor to Netflix in December. Realtime Adaptive Streaming LLC v. Netflix Inc. et al., 17-CV1692 (D. Del., filed Nov. 21, 2017).

— Nicolas Sonnenburg