Fabio Marino

Marino is a former software engineer who now leads Polsinelli’s intellectual property litigation group, as well as its Silicon Valley office. He specializes in trade secrets, patents and copyrights about software.

Even so, two of his most challenging cases recently involved sock-knitting machines and bullets. What made them challenging was getting jurisdiction over and serving defendants in, respectively, China and Bosnia.

Typically, serving parties outside the United States requires working through the Hague Service Convention. That takes time, and with the pandemic, it takes even more time, Marino said. “Trying to serve somebody in Bosnia or most other countries today, with COVID, is going to take two years.”

But he only had about two months to protect his Virginia-based client’s right to purchase ammunition from a Bosnian manufacturer. The client, DAG Ammo Corp., buys the ammo to sell in the U.S. People connected to the manufacturer stole the company’s pricing information and passed it on to a local competitor and to the Bosnian government, putting DAG’s export license at risk.

So Marino and his team investigated ways to escape the Hague Convention’s requirements. “We were able to convince the court in Virginia to let us serve them by email,” he said. That led to an international Zoom mediation and a settlement just two months after the lawsuit was filed. DAG Ammo Corp. v. KM Trade d.o.o., 3:21-cv-00332 (E.D. VA., filed May 21, 2021)

He is using the same approach in a Los Angeles patent suit representing an Italian company suing a Chinese manufacturer that is making knockoffs of his client’s closed-toe sock knitting machines and selling them at greatly reduced prices to U.S. customers. He had a motion pending in late September to be allowed to serve the Chinese defendants by non-Hague means. Lonati S.P.A. v. Soxnet Inc., 2-20-cv-05539 (C.D. Cal., filed June 22, 2020)

Marino also is on the adjunct faculty of Santa Clara University School of Law, where he has taught IP litigation. He also has coached patent moot court teams there and at UC Berkeley School of Law. That is especially rewarding, he said, because the final eight teams in the national competition argue before a panel of Federal Circuit judges. “It’s really a great experience for the kids.”

Before he went to law school himself, Marino developed artificial intelligence software systems. “I developed the fraud detection system for American Express,” he said. “When you got a phone call saying … there’s been fraud in your account, [that was] actually an AI system I built in the late ’80s and ’90s.”

— Don DeBenedictdis