Sonal Mehta

Mehta is an experienced patent litigator who is ready to take cases to trial. But she is especially proud of the skill she and her team have shown for not needing to. Mehta is an experienced patent litigator who is ready to take cases to trial. But she is especially proud of the skill she and her team have shown for not needing to.

“I think we have a really nice track record of being able to help clients resolve cases through summary judgment and other dispositive motions before they have to go to trial,” she said. She does that for both very large tech companies and for innovative start-ups.

An especially noteworthy example of that prowess is the early summary judgment she won for Intel Corp. in 2020. It is believed to be the first such motion granted by Waco’s U.S. District Judge Alan Albright and the first early summary judgment motion he had considered, which he took up as during claim construction.

“Our position was the summary judgment motion was something he could resolve based just on the record of the patent,” Mehta explained. “It didn’t have any factual issues that would require him to proceed with discovery.” The Federal Circuit upheld Albright’s rulings in July. Flash-Control LLC v. Intel Corp., 2020-2141 (Fed. Circ., decis. July 14, 2021).

In April 2020, she and her team took over defense of video-game maker Activision in an eight-year-old case and won a summary judgment motion just a year later. The judge ruled that the five patents the plaintiff claimed were infringed by the games “Call of Duty” and “World of WarCraft” did not cover patentable subject matter. Worlds Inc. v. Activision Blizzard Inc., 1:12-cv-10576 (D. Mass., filed March 30, 2012).

Mehta is defending a small startup company that has created a machine that provides high-resolution, spatial analysis of tissue samples for cancer and other research. She won a “patent showdown” before Senior U.S. District Judge William Alsup on two patent claims, which was enough for the plaintiff to drop its other claims. The case is now on appeal. Fluidigm Corp. v. IONpath Inc., 3:19-cv-05639 (N.D. Cal., filed Sept. 6, 2019).

Last year, Mehta was the president of the nationwide Federal Circuit Bar Association. Because of the pandemic, the group was unable to put on its usual in-person meetings and programs. “For us, the biggest challenge was to continue to give people… vehicles to continue to interact with their colleagues at different firms and different practice areas,” she said. She praised the association staff for making remote gatherings successful.

She also co-teaches a class in patent litigation at the UC Berkeley School of Law each spring. While she is very glad to be back in the classroom after two years of remote teaching, some Zoom learning will continue. “We were able to give [students] the opportunity to do Zoom oral arguments and to take a deposition by Zoom, which are skills that I think will actually translate to the post- Pandemic world.”

– Don DeBenedictis