Jonathan S. Kagan

Kagan scored a major trial victory for his client, Juniper Networks Inc., in a patent infringement lawsuit by Finjan Holdings Inc.

“Jon is one of most creative thinking litigators I have ever met, yet he never suggests any course of action that I would consider to be unethical or skating the boundaries of the law, as I have seen some law firms do when they get creative,” said Juniper deputy general counsel Meredith McKenzie.

Kagan had to apply that creativity to defending Juniper against Finjan, which has a reputation for successfully litigating its cybersecurity patents, according to Kagan.

Finjan sought $60 million in damages in the case.

“They picked the wrong defendant if that was a strategy,” Kagan said. “That’s not how Juniper operates.”

Ultimately, Finjan got what Kagan calls a “dream scenario” for a plaintiff: Finjan had to select its patent with the strongest case to be argued in front of a jury just a year after its claim was filed.

But Kagan and co-lead counsel Rebecca L. Carson persuaded U.S. District Judge William Alsup of San Francisco to grant summary judgment against Finjan’s claims on one cybersecurity patent. In December, Kagan helped win a jury verdict of no infringement on another one.

In an earlier case, Mobile Telecommunications LLC had already successfully proved patent infringement against a different defendant in a previous trial, and that complicated the case for Kagan.

“It makes it particularly hard when that happens because the other defendant had raised invalidity arguments and they were not accepted,” Kagan said.

Kagan and his team instead relied on translating the patent’s legalese into plain English to illustrate how Juniper’s products did not infringe on three patents Mobile Telecommunications held on wireless network equipment and how those systems operate. Mobile Telecommunications LLC v. Juniper Networks Inc., 16-CV00698 (D. of Delaware, filed Aug. 10, 2016).

“He approaches each issue with a problem solving mindset and is always thinking ahead many steps,” McKenzie said. “I would liken him to a grand master in chess. ... He will think through any approach or strategy thoroughly.”

Alsup, who presided over the Finjan case, said Kagan’s closing argument was “one of the best I’ve heard in the U.S. District Court in a long time,” according to court documents of the case’s post-trial proceedings.

“And it wasn’t because it was emotional,” Alsup added. “It was just good, calm explanation of something that was complicated.”

— Nicole Tyau