I. Neel Chatterjee

Chatterjee and his Orrick colleagues were brought in to represent Ruckus Wireless Inc. less than two months before a make-or-break jury trial against competitor Netgear Inc.

Netgear was seeking to bar the sale of most Ruckus products for allegedly infringing two patents related to hardware and software for accessing the Internet. Netgear Inc. v. Ruckus Wireless inc., CV10-999 (D. Del., filed Nov. 19, 2010).

"Anytime you're asked to step in, you're going to have some level of trepidation," Chatterjee said. "There was a short timeframe, and I knew there was a lot to do."

A Netgear victory would have dealt Ruckus a crippling blow, but the late hire paid off for Ruckus' general counsel, Scott R. Maples. After four hours of deliberations, the federal jury in Delaware returned a comprehensive noninfringement verdict for Ruckus and Chatterjee's team.

Despite the short preparation time, Chatterjee and his team were able to support Ruckus experts and discredit Netgear experts at trial.

"When we cross-examined their experts, they admitted that they didn't look at the hardware and didn't look at a single line of code in the software," he said.

The companies entered into a comprehensive settlement agreement in January that concluded all pending litigation, Netgear disclosed to federal regulators in February.

Chatterjee, the chair of Orrick's intellectual property group, was also quick to credit his trial team, which consisted mostly of a mix of minorities and women.

"The thing I'm most proud of is an amazingly diverse team," he said. "Diversity is a community service. We're actually succeeding in achieving that without compromising the quality. That's a hard thing to do and we're going to keep doing more."

- Kevin Lee