Charles K. Verhoeven

Verhoeven is the co-chair of Quinn Emanuel’s national intellectual property litigation practice and is generally considered one of the best patent litigators around. This past year he came out on top for his clients in a couple of trials by outmaneuvering his opponents. His strategy in both cases centered on the pros and cons of standard essential patents and feature patents.

The first was a trial in July in which Huawei accused Verizon of infringing several patents essential to the 5G standard. “This was a massive lawsuit concerning… whether or not Verizon had to pay royalty payments to Huawei to basically exist,” Verhoeven said.

He said claims asserting standard essential patents are usually brought before the ITC to obtain exclusion orders. The Chinese electronics giant sued Verizon in the Eastern District of Texas to seek damages. Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. v. Verizon Communications Inc., 2:20-cv- 00030 (E.D. Tex., filed Feb. 5, 2020).

“The plaintiffs, in my opinion, were too smart by half,” he said. “And they didn’t think through what would happen.”

Verhoeven’s team filed a counterclaim for fraud and breach of contract. And they told the jury what they believed really lay behind Huawei’s lawsuit. Verizon had been very close to agreeing to offer Huawei’s top phone to its customers when then-President Donald J. Trump banned its phones from this country. “Huawei got pissed and filed this lawsuit,” Verhoeven said.

There was some drama about whether Judge Rodney Gilstrap would allow the evidence in, but a week before the trial began, he agreed. “So we started putting it in, and the case ended up settling” after three days of trial.

The second case was part of an ongoing dispute in which Sonos LLC claims some Google devices infringe patents on Sonos home audio systems. The speaker company filed at the ITC seeking to ban imports of the devices. But, Verhoeven said, “Sonos filed a bunch of crappy feature patents” there.

His strategy in response was simply for Google to design around the problematic features. Sonos won an order to exclude the previous versions of the devices, but it didn’t matter, he said. “We implemented all of those [design changes] and certified to Customs that we’d done that, and the entire event was a big nothing.” In the Matter of Certain Audio Players and Controllers, 337-1191 (U.S. ITC, instituted Feb. 6, 2020).

Coming up, Verhoeven is scheduled to go to trial in August and October representing Charter Communications Inc. and its Bright House subsidiary against lawsuits by all the major record companies, who claim the cable company should prevent users from repeatedly copying songs online. A jury hit Cox Communications with a $1 billion verdict in a similar suit in 2019.

Verhoeven argues that internet service providers like Charter should not be held responsible for protecting the music companies’ works. “They’re asking for a huge amount of money essentially saying we’re responsible for infringement of their content, even though we’re just a pipe,” he said.

– Don DeBenedictis