Mike Bettinger

As the head of Sidley Austin's West Coast intellectual property litigation group, Bettinger has spent much of the past year wrangling litigation on behalf of major technology companies such as Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp., LinkedIn Corp. and Adobe Systems Inc.

One of them goes back a dozen years. SpeedTrack Inc. sued Amazon and many major retailers claiming they infringe its patent with their "faceted search feature," which lets shoppers narrow down searches by size, brand, price and so forth.

Bettinger, who represents Amazon, said the otherwise ordinary case has presented "a fascinating legal issue" over claim construction and disclaimers.

That and other issues were argued by phone earlier this month before the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, the third time the case has been to that court. SpeedTrack Inc. v. Amazon.com Inc., 20-1573 (Fed. Cir., filed April 4, 2020).

A more recent and more tangled set of lawsuits involves patents about creating websites online without needing any specialized software.

Bettinger represents Adobe and its Magento unit, Microsoft, LinkedIn and Dropbox in what he described as a significant case.

The plaintiff sued Dropbox in the Western District of Texas, but Bettinger wanted the case moved to the Northern District of California, where most of the other actions are.

Rather than filing a venue motion in the Texas court, the Sidley team did something he called novel for these times.

They showed a draft of their motion to the other side and simply requested the case be refiled in San Francisco. Express Mobile agreed. Express Mobile Inc. v. Dropbox Inc., 21-CV01145 (N.D. Cal., filed Feb. 16, 2021).

A third case presented a different sort of challenge. At the height of the coronavirus surge last holiday season, the judge asked the attorneys to come in person to her court in Florida for major hearings. Twice.

"And it's Orlando. Half the people on the plane are going to Disneyland," he said.

But the hearings allowed his team to explain the case carefully to the judge, who had never heard a patent matter before. Bell Semiconductor LLC v. Renesas Electronics Corp., 19-CV02196 (M.D. Fla., Nov. 18, 2019).

"It turned out to be a blessing to be able to do that, but it wasn't real popular here at home," Bettinger said.

-- Don DeBenedictis