Daralyn J. Durie

For Durie, this past summer all but broke the space-time continuum. “I’ve been joking that the laws that keep everything from happening at the same time have failed me,” she said.

She was scheduled to go from trial to trial to trial in a matter of weeks.

“All of the courts re-opened at the same time. I didn’t expect everything to reopen so quickly and all at once,” she said.

The trial time pressure did not seem to present much of a problem for her. Durie won her first two trials handily. On June 24, a Texas jury rejected claims that her client Activision had violated a wrestling star’s copyright in a comic book character modeled after him. Huffman v. Activision Publishing Inc., 2:19-cv-00050 (E.D. Tex, filed Feb. 12, 2019)

A month later, an Oakland jury awarded $178 million to her client Plexxikon after finding that Novartis had willfully infringed patents covering a melanoma treatment. Plexxikon Inc. v. Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corp., 17-cv-04405 (N.D. Cal., filed Aug. 3, 2017)

That verdict arrived on July 22. On July 27, five days before trial was to begin, Durie settled long-running patent disputes over genetic sequencing technology between her client 10X Genomics and Bio-Rad Laboratories. 10x Genomics Inc. v. Celsee Inc., 1:19-cv-00862 (D. Del., filed May 8, 2019).

That left her free to participate in a July 29 Markman hearing for client Dropworks, which is being sued by Bio-Rad for allegedly infringing patents over a type of digital genetic testing. Bio-Rad Laboratories Inc. v. Dropworks Inc., 1:20-cv-00506 (D. Del., filed April 14, 2020).

She had one other trial originally set for June, a case brought by a former graduate student against her client, the City of Hope, over a method to genetically engineer immune cells to treat cancers. The case settled the same day as closing arguments in the wrestler’s case. Mardiros v. City of Hope, 2:19-cv-02196 (C.D. Cal, filed March 22, 2019).

Durie said the crunch of courtroom activity required her to focus more sharply on what would and would not be crucial in each trial.

Riding her bicycle and motorcycle also helped. She biked a roundtrip from Oakland to Point Reyes one Saturday and motorcycled down the coast to Big Sur another day. “Definitely it’s fair to say that riding on two wheels has formed part of my trial prep strategy.”

— Don DeBenedictis