Michael W. De Vries

Working on cases that involve larger geopolitical issues, De Vries won $1.62 billion in two separate plaintiff-side jury verdicts in 2020. Since 2018, he has secured more than $2.1 billion in damages awards and settlements.

The results will influence IP protection strategies while guiding the adaptation of trial advocacy in technology disputes in the face of the ongoing pandemic.

De Vries and his team have led on asserting claims under the 2016 Defend Trade Secrets Act to address the widespread theft by competitors of technological innovations from companies in California, the U.S. and globally.

“Some trials have been delayed [by Covid-19 precautions], but now things are moving forward again generally,” said De Vries, who persisted in two courtroom showdowns despite the coronavirus threat.

“We have one upcoming in Texas with full protective protocols despite that state’s loosening of restrictions,” he said.

Recent clients have included Motorola Solutions Inc., The TriZetto Group Inc., EagleView Technologies, LivePerson Inc., Cisco Systems Inc., Inventus Power Inc., Avigilon Fortress Corp., Oracle Corp., Sierra Wireless Inc., HCC Insurance Holdings Inc., Matrixx Initiatives Inc., Apcon Inc., Comet Technologies USA Inc. and Omnitracs LLC.

In October, De Vries and colleagues won $855 million in damages after a New York federal jury deliberated for less than three hours on claims that client TriZetto’s healthcare insurance software code was stolen by a competitor that is now part of the French firm Atos SE. Syntel Sterling Best Shores Mauritius Ltd. v. The TriZetto Group Inc., 15-CV00211 (S.D. N.Y., filed Jan. 12, 2015).

It was the first in-person civil jury trial held in the Southern District of New York since the beginning of the pandemic.

“I had a 100 percent comfort level, because the court was very careful in the way it managed the entire process,” DeVries said. Lawyers and witnesses were protected by Plexiglas enclosures in a specially modified courtroom.

The Kirkland team persuaded the court to flip the parties so that TriZetto could proceed as plaintiffs. Syntel’s original complaint demanded $6 billion, but in pretrial litigation De Vries and his team won discovery sanctions, a preclusion order, a court-ordered forensic examination that revealed Syntel’s misappropriation of TriZetto’s technology and the elimination on summary judgment of his adversary’s primary claims.

“One of our themes was the IP theft problem generally,” De Vries said. “We showed that our trade secrets and copyrighted material was on their systems.”

For Motorola, De Vries persuaded an Illinois federal jury to award his client $765 million in trade secret and copyright infringement claims against a China-based competitor. Motorola Solutions Inc. v. Hytera Communications Corp. Ltd., 17-CV01973 (N.D. Ill., filed March 14, 2017).

“That trial took place in February, just as Covid was taking hold,” De Vries said. “You’d see people in the courthouse coughing. We focused on the refusal of the defendant to take responsibility for what they’d done.”

— John Roemer