Jennifer Seraphine

Early last year, Seraphine won a motion to dismiss a lawsuit against a longtime client. After the opposing plaintiff appealed the ruling to the U.S. Second Circuit of Appeals, she settled the case.

“I was actually quite devastated that I didn’t get to argue that 2nd Circuit issue. I was looking forward to it because it was a really complex and dorky issue of law,” she said. “But you do what’s right for your client.”

Although she and her firm are quite capable of litigating a case through trial, “I do believe sincerely… it is really important to consistently be aware of what the best business solution for the client is,” she said.

In fact, Seraphine thinks she may have a knack for settling cases even before they’re filed. For instance, she resolved a high-stakes dispute pre-litigation with a Fortune 5 company on behalf of the same client for whom she didn’t present that dorky argument.

That client is Simple Wishes LLC, which makes nursing bras with a patented method for attaching small breast pumps. “It’s not what you think of when you think of patent litigation.”

Even so, she did obtain a general order of exclusion from the ITC to keep infringing bras from being sold in the U.S., and she used that to file a complaint against a successful third-party seller on Amazon. That company responded by suing Simple Wishes and a refrigerator distributor that had also complained for tortious interference with business relations. Global Supplies NY Inc. v. Electrolux Home Products Inc., 1:19-cv-04823 (E.D.N.Y, filed Aug. 22, 2019).

Seraphine has been litigating intellectual property matters for over 25 years, involving a wide variety of technologies and clients. Besides bras, other clients make tiny motors for prosthetic hands, lights that push individual cells into miniscule devices for analysis and blood-draw equipment specialized to avoid contamination.

One client is Rearden Inc., a technology incubator that owns the performance facial motion capture technology called MOVA, used to give emotions to Disney’s Beast and to Benjamin Button as a baby.

She successfully defended the company against claims of patent, trademark and copyright infringement by proving her client had always owned the MOVA software and hardware. “The court bifurcated the ownership issue, and we spent a year litigating that,” she said.

Midway into the case, Seraphine obtained a highly unusual preliminary injunction when the original plaintiff vanished and was replaced by another. Eventually, the court untangled that confusion and found that the plaintiffs had known all along that her client always owned the technology. Virtue Global Holdings Ltd. v. Rearden Inc., 3:15-cv-00797 (N.D. Cal., filed Feb. 20, 2015).

“It was never a dull moment in that case,” Seraphine said.

– Don DeBenedictis