Mike Bettinger

Bettinger leads Sidley Austin’s intellectual property group on the West Coast. In that role, he litigates patent disputes for major technology companies, including Adobe, Amazon, Dropbox, Huawei and LinkedIn, among others.

He scored an important victory last year for Amazon when the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld a California district court’s ruling that the company had not infringed patents on a method to search data. The plaintiff claimed its patents described the “faceted searches” that Amazon and many other companies provide to allow users to refine searches by various attributes, such as size or color. The lawsuit sought damages in the high nine-figure range.

On appeal, the issue turned on differing assertions the plaintiff made in the litigation compared to those made when seeking the patent. Bettinger said the appellate court “went out of its way to publish that decision and really make some law” about estoppel and disclosures. He said the opinion makes clear that a patentee can be bound by statements it makes during litigation that characterize what took place during patent prosecution. SpeedTrack Inc. v. Amazon.com Inc. 2022-1573 (Fed. Cir., decided June 3, 2021).

Bettinger represents Microsoft, Adobe, LinkedIn and Dropbox and leads a defense group of about 20 more defendants in multiple cases about patents covering technology for creating websites online rather than with software on a personal computer. The case began when he filed a declaratory relief action against the patent holder, Express Mobile, on behalf of a small e-commerce platform since acquired by Adobe. Express Mobile then sued the other companies.

“It turned into World War III with all this litigation financing behind it and firms from all over the country involved,” he said. The litigation is stayed during proceedings in the Patent Office. Although the litigation is large and complicated, Bettinger said he has enjoyed working with the other law firms Magento inc. v. Express Mobile Inc., 317-cv-02605 (N.D. Cal., filed May 5, 2017).

In addition to software, Bettinger has become a top lawyer for patent disputes involving solar energy and panels. “There’s a lot of action in that area,” he said.

He is defending Canadian Solar in two sets of litigation, both in courts and the International Trade Commission over solar panel technology, The first was brought by a Northern California competitor and the second by one in Boston.

The methods used to capture sunlight without letting it reflect away or convert to hear are fascinating, he said. Thanks to working on the cases, “we have a deep knowledge now” about how the panels work.

And that is just the sort of knowledge he needs to litigate patent cases. “I’m the guy who gets involved when you have to present [a patent] to the judge or the jury and try to dumb it down,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s valur added, but that’s what I do.”

– Don DeBenedictis