Mark Lemley

Along with his litigation practice at Durie Tangri, the IP boutique he co-founded, Lemley is the William H. Neukom Professor of Law at Stanford Law School.

"I taught my first full Zoom class on 47 little screens and it went pretty well," Lemley said in early August. The course was Introduction to Intellectual Property, and he's an authority: with a win for client GoPro Inc. at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which reversed a Patent Trial and Appeal Board final written decision, Lemley is now on a nine case winning streak in his appellate practice there. GoPro Inc. v. Contour IP Holding LLC, 17-1894 and 17-1936 (Fed. Cir., op. issued July 27, 2018).

More recently, he helped organize the Open Covid Pledge, which has signed up dozens of companies and labs to commit more than 250,000 patents for temporary use in fighting the pandemic. "I wrote the license agreement," he said. "This is part of what I'm doing during the quarantine." Founding adopters include Facebook, Amazon.com Inc., Intel Corp., IBM Corp. and Sandia National Laboratories.

Lemley said the goal is to open essential technologies to those who need them. "We know people are making use of the technologies on the treatment and testing side. We have patents available on ventilators and masks and various electronics. We have a vaccine candidate from a small independent lab. So far, we haven't gotten big pharma--this is a major revenue source for them."

In what may be a landmark antitrust case, Lemley is co-lead counsel for a potential class of HIV drug purchasers who allege that as patents covering Gilead Sciences Inc.'s core antiretroviral drugs were expiring, the company agreed with its competitors Janssen Global Services LLC and Bristol-Myer Squibb Co. to develop combinations that require the use of Gilead's branded drugs, even after the patents' expiration. Staley v. Gilead Sciences Inc., 3:19-cv-02573 (N.D. Cal., filed May 14, 2019).

Following a lengthy hearing on the defendants' consolidated motions to dismiss--at which Lemley argued for nearly three hours--U.S. District Judge Edward M. Chen of San Francisco rejected Gilead's central claim that the no-generics provisions of the deal are lawful "ancillary restraints" to legitimate joint ventures. Chen allowed Lemley's case to go forward.

"For the first time in my career the oral argument session ran longer than the moot court we conducted to prepare for it," Lemley said. "And I'm really glad we did the moot court, because Judge Chen had a lot of questions he wished to explore in detail. And he ruled just a couple of weeks after the argument. Without trials now, it looks like judges have more time, just like the rest of us."

-- John Roemer