Clara J. Shin

To win a trademark case, Shin believes an attorney must excel at distilling complex legal concepts into digestible information for a judge and jury.

"It's about pulling all the facts together to explain what constitutes infringement, even when the other side says they didn't infringe," said Shin, a San Francisco-based partner with Covington & Burling LLP. "You have to put it in a narrative that makes sense."

That's the skill she believes she brought to the table last summer, when she won $500,000 in an infringement case brought against her client, New York-based consumer goods maker World Marketing Inc.

In a Central District lawsuit, Shin's client initially faced accusations of infringing a trademark of apparel retailer Quicksilver Inc., but World Marketing Inc. turned the tables with counterclaims of infringement.

The case in front of an eight-person jury dealt with whether the VSTR - a line of clothing produced by Quicksilver - infringed World Marketing's VISITOR mark that it had registered in 1998. World Marketing renewed the VISITOR mark in 2008. QS Wholesale Inc. v. World Marketing Inc., 12-451 (C.D. Cal., filed Mar. 21, 2012).

Shin impeached several witnesses during trial.

"The company represented that it had stopped selling all VISITOR-labeled goods, but I showed on the cross of Quiksilver's CEO that they continued to sell those goods even throughout trial," she said.

The jury sided with Shin's client, awarding $3.5 million in punitive damages to World Marketing.

U.S. District Judge David O. Carter reduced that figure, but awarded the Covington & Burling team $1.8 million in fees and nearly $200,000 in attorney costs. The case is on appeal.

- Saul Sugarman