Adam R. Alper

Adam R. Alper is a veteran Kirkland & Ellis LLP partner who excels in high-stakes IP competitor cases, including the $30 million in lost profits and punitive damages he obtained last year for messaging platform LivePerson Inc. over patent infringement and trade secret theft by a rival—a Daily Journal Top Verdict of 2021.

Working as usual with law partner Michael W. De Vires and an experienced Kirkland team, Alper deftly exposed for a federal jury the technical details and economic impact of the defendant’s misconduct. He also explored a theme that helps cut through those complexities to highlight for jurors what’s really at stake in many of his cases: the moral debt a wrongdoer owes. LivePerson Inc. v. [24]7 Inc., 4:17- cv-01268 (N.D. Cal., filed March 10, 2017).

“The technical evidence is very important,” Alper said, “but in our competitor cases there are also issues of right and wrong and who’s the victim.”

A similar dynamic was in play in Alper’s newest win, this one in March 2022 for a builder of advanced semiconductor manufacturing gear that uses radio frequencies to etch computer chips at near-atomic scale. He and the team scored a $40 million jury verdict in federal court in San Jose for his client on claims that a rival poached employees and misappropriated trade secrets to access the years of another’s expensive research and development work. Comet Technologies USA Inc. et al., v. XP Power LLC, 5:20-cv-06408 (N.D. Cal., filed Sept. 11, 2020).

“XP tried to leapfrog over all that work by luring over former Comet engineers with thousands of files,” Alper said. “Through our Comet witnesses, we showed the jury how much effort went in to the products’ development and how valuable it was. We showed how extensively XP used that work for its own benefit. And we presented a real story of right and wrong and corporate responsibility. It was clear XP was not doing the right thing. A theft had happened, and the jury responded.”

Alper stressed the importance of Kirkland IP team members, Sharre S. Lotfollahi, Leslie M. Schmidt and Akshay S. Deoras, to his cases.

In a defense case for network security, client Apcon, Inc., Alper, De Vries and the team last year won a complete victory. A Texas jury in 2021 found no infringement and invalidated each of the plaintiff’s six asserted patents. Gigamon Inc. v. Apcon Inc., 2:19-cv-00300 (E. D. Texas, filed Aug. 30, 2019).

“We explained that Gigamon sued for the wrong reasons, to try to take advantage of a competitor by stretching its patents to cover something it did not invent, and the jury didn’t like it,” Alper said. In late March 2022, the judge denied all of Gigamon’s post-trial motions, setting up a possible appeal.

Alper selects representations carefully. “We field a lot of cases. We don’t take them all. We focus on strong technical and economic evidence but also on who’s right and who’s wrong.”

--John Roemer