Darin W. Snyder

Snyder is O’Melveny’s regional head of litigation for Northern California, the former chair of the intellectual property and technology practice group and a member of the policy committee and the executive committee.

He has done extensive work on intellectual property litigation for Alphabet Inc.-owned Google over the years. Snyder’s other clients include Niantic Inc. and Artifex Software Inc.

“Google is one of the many clients that keep me busy,” Snyder said. Noting that some cases are more challenging than others, he pointed to an instance in 2016 when Google retained his team to parachute in as trial counsel in a patent case over malware protection technology in the plaintiff-friendly Eastern District of Texas. Trial was set to launch in just five months.

The O’Melveny team managed to eliminate one disputed patent from the case. Even so, “We got hired late, and we lost — the jury’s verdict was $20 million for the plaintiffs,” Snyder said. “We were trying to put it back in the bottle.”

To do so, he moved for post-trial relief in part on the grounds that Chief U.S. District Judge Rodney Gilstrap of Marshall, Texas, sent to the jury a question regarding the so-called “recapture rule” that the judge should have answered. Gilstrap agreed and granted a new trial on that validity issue.

In July 2018, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued final office actions in three ex parte reexamination proceedings rejecting all claims on the three patents the plaintiffs are asserting. The district court proceeding and related appeals at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit are ongoing. Cioffi v. Google Inc., 13-CV00103 (E.D. Tex., filed Feb. 5, 2013).

How did the client react? “Google is a very sophisticated client,” Snyder said. “They understand well the risks of taking a case to a jury. So when a verdict gets reported in the news as Google lost, the client’s internal evaluation of the situation may be different. They have not complained of our work in this case.”

— John Roemer