Michael J. Lyons

Concluding a decade-long fight that turned on a change in the law, Lyons led a Morgan Lewis & Bockius team in securing a $268 million judgment and willful infringement enhancement for a nonprofit research laboratory.

In November, a federal judge reinstated a $134 million jury verdict from 2014 and doubled the damages for willful infringement.

“We certainly thought we had the facts to support a significant enhancement, but when you’re talking about doubling enhancement of the judgment, there’s very little precedent out there in the patent case world,” Lyons said.

In a lawsuit filed in 2007, Lyons’ client, the Alfred E. Mann Foundation, claimed Cochlear Corp. infringed several of its patents for cochlear implant technology that restores hearing ability. Alfred E. Mann Foundation For Scientific Research v. Cochlear Corporation, 07-CV8108 (C.D. Cal., filed Dec. 13, 2007).

“You had a big company basically taking the technology of a nascent competitor and running with it and trying to litigate them into oblivion over years and years,” Lyons said.

Following an initial 2014 federal jury verdict in favor of the Mann Foundation, a judge cleared Cochlear of willful infringement liability and threw out three of the claims.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit revived the claims in 2016 in light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Halo Electronics v. Pulse Electronics, which allowed districts courts discretion to award willful infringement enhancements up to triple the amount. Halo Electronics. Inc. v. Pulse Electronics, Inc., 136 S.Ct. 1923.

The prior willfulness standard had been much higher, so the new law allowed the federal judge to ultimately confirm the willfulness verdict, according to Lyons.

“Our case is really the poster child for why the Supreme Court revisited the law here,” Lyons said. “The idea of the jurisprudence in the first instance was to find the egregious infringers. ... The facts are almost exactly what I think animated the Supreme Court to say, ‘That’s not the right way to look at this question.’”

While the liability finding has been conclusively established, the willfulness enhancement is on appeal.

— Erin Lee