J. David Hadden

Fenwick & West LLP

Mountain View

Patent litigation

Hadden works to help Amazon.com Inc. defend its patents.

Whenever the company unveils a new technology, Hadden said, there is typically a long line of patent holding companies, aggrieved competitors and smaller firms that emerge to contest who actually owns the technology.

"Right now I'm doing a bunch of cases involving Alexa," Hadden said. "You get to litigate but also become a pseudo-expert in interesting technologies."

Hadden said he is defending five Alexa patent cases.

"Various aspects of Alexa or the infrastructure that supports it are accused of infringing patents from all over the place," he said. "Most of them are trolls on one level or another. Some of the patents came out of companies that either were developing products that ultimately did not succeed or were in the market and didn't last long."

Hadden, a former National Science Foundation graduate fellow who completed graduate work in sting theory at Princeton, also holds an undergraduate degree in physics from Yale, where he earned his law degree.

In a case where Amazon's S3 and CloudFront services were alleged to be infringing, Hadden said he filed a lawsuit seeking declaratory judgment to shut down a patent infringement case against more than 80 customers of Amazon Web Services. Amazon.com Inc. et al. v. Personal Web Technologies LLC et al., 18-CV00767 (N.D. Cal., filed Feb. 5, 2018).

After the cases were consolidated, Hadden convinced the court to stay all except Amazon's declaratory judgment action and a single case against Amazon subsidiary Twitch Interactive Inc. This saved Amazon's customers from prolonged litigation, he said. In April 2019, U.S. District Judge Beth Labson Freeman of San Jose granted Amazon's summary judgment motion and barred PersonalWeb's infringement claims.

Hadden said he believes his record of resolving cases by securing summary judgment is a rarity and the reason he is chosen by many well-known technology companies to head litigation involving complex technical issues.

One such instance is Hadden's representation of Netflix Inc. in a multi-patent dispute concerning the company's video compression technology. Realtime Adaptive Streaming LLC v. Netflix Inc. et al., 19-CV06361 (C.D. Cal. filed July 23, 2019).

The case was filed in the District of Delaware, where a magistrate judge recommended finding four of plaintiff Realtime's asserted patents invalid as ineligible subject matter under 35 U.S.C. §101.

Realtime then voluntarily dismissed the case and subsequently filed the same claims in the Central District of California, where Hadden filed a motion to transfer back to Delaware as well as a motion for Netflix's costs and fees associated with the Delaware case. Realtime then voluntarily dismissed its cases against Netflix.

-- Carter Stoddard