Michael C. Hendershot

As Jones Day’s Northern California IP practice leader, Michael C. Hendershot represents leading companies such as Google LLC, Twilio Inc., Cohesity, Inc., The Boeing Co., Guardant Health, Inc., LG Corp., Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and NXP Semiconductors NV.

“It’s a good time,” Hendershot said in early spring 2022 as pandemic restrictions eased. “Work remains steady. Courts have been flexible, but we are starting to get back into conference rooms and courtrooms, back to something like normal.”

In the extremely competitive data storage marketplace, Hendershot defended a market leader, Cohesity, when rival company Commvault Systems Inc. filed its first-ever IP lawsuit. It alleged infringement of six patents related to cloud-based backup, recovery and data management applications. Hendershot and his client suspected the litigation was a strategic move by the plaintiff.

“Commvault has a number of patents and they clearly saw litigation as a business tool,” Hendershot said. Following nearly two years of litigation, including multiple rounds of claim construction in the district court and the institution of two IPRs filed by Cohesity, the parties resolved the matter on confidential terms and it was dismissed in January 2022.

“By suing, Commvault hoped to slow down a rival. They went to the press before they even filed their complaint—a tipoff to their motivation,” Hendershot said. Commvault Systems Inc. v. Cohesity Inc., 1:20-cv-00525 (D. Del., filed April 21, 2020).

“We effectively defended the case in the district court and at the patent office,” Hendershot said. “It was very interesting technically, and we were litigating against high-quality counsel on the other side. But Commvault did not make any headway in the marketplace and our client continued to do well. We resolved it and our client was happy to move forward with its business.”

Amid the pandemic, in July 2020, Hendershot won a complete victory for cloud communications platform provider Twilio Inc. in Delaware’s first telephonic “Section 101 day” hearing that went seven hours, including a lunch break. Pivital IP LLC v. Twilio Inc., 20-cv-00254 (D. Del., filed Feb. 23, 2020).

The plaintiff challenged the eligibility of Twilio’s patents for its SendGrid messaging platform; Herdershot’s arguments led to the invalidation of all asserted claims and a dismissal with prejudice of the plaintiff’s case. That avoided the need for discovery or litigation beyond the pleadings.

“The court read its ruling into the transcript at the end of the day,” Hendershot said. “We had put so much into it that we got an immediate result.”

– John Roemer