William C. Price

Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP

Los Angeles

IP litigation

When a potentially billion-dollar case is headed to trial, the partners at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP know who to enlist.

"I guess I'm sort of the firm's barrister; I just go from trial to trial," Price said. "I only got into this field because the firm brought me into it."

Price tried his first patent case in 2005, a contingency matter involving patents on pre-paid cell phone calls. He won $128 million for the plaintiffs and got hooked on patent litigation.

In January, Price -- with partners Rachel L. McCracken, James R. Asperger and Kevin P.B. Johnson -- won a $1.1 billion verdict for Caltech in a case against Broadcom Inc. and Apple Inc. for infringement of Wi-Fi-related coding technologies. The California Institute of Technology v. Broadcom Ltd. et al., 16-CV03714 (C.D. Cal., filed May 26, 2016).

According to plaintiffs, a number of Caltech's Wi-Fi-related inventions were patented as far back as 2000, long before smart devices and data became widely used.

"There are so many inventions that are so far ahead of their time that they aren't used for years," Price said. "That's what happened here. Their error correction technology wasn't used by the industry until probably 2009. The iPhone came out in 2007 and these devices eventually became thirsty for massive amounts of data, and they had to find an error-correcting system to get great device performance."

The damages phase of the trial centered on devices that used the error-correcting technology between May 2010 and August 2019 for Broadcom, and May 2010 and September 2019 for Apple. McCracken handled the damages phase.

"It really comes down to the question of who does the jury trust?" Price said. Despite complexities of the subject matter, a jury will always understand who is being forthright and who is not, he said.

Technology sectors often ignore the intellectual property rights of universities that devote a lot of time and money for research but too often don't have the resources to police infringement of their work, he said.

"Universities aren't equipped to monitor the world and see where their products are actually being used," he said. "Their research is for the purpose of expanding our knowledge and benefit mankind. They aren't focused on monetizing that research."

-- Gina Kim