Victoria F. Maroulis

After moving back to California in the late ‘90s, Victoria F. Maroulis got into intellectual property litigation because “it was a very much expanding area of law that a lot of people were getting into,” she explained. “So, I tried my hand at IP litigation and learned to really love it and have been doing it ever since.”

Maroulis currently leads Quinn Emanuel’s Silicon Valley office as a managing partner and co-chair in the firm’s intellectual property litigation practice. She has litigated for companies on a broad range of patent, copyright, trademark and trade secrets matters in the field of telecommunications, software, hardware, semiconductors, medical devices and biotechnology.

She has successfully represented clients such as Samsung, BlackBerry and General Motors.

“The innovative work of our clients inspires me to be the best lawyer I can be,” Maroulis said. “And the combination of being exposed to really interesting cutting-edge technologies and complicated cerebral areas of law have made the job truly rewarding.”

For over a decade, Maroulis has represented Samsung in a variety of matters. In 2021, she obtained a summary judgment victory for the company on the grounds of patent exhaustion and license in a patent lawsuit relating to LTE declared-essential patents asserted against hundreds of Samsung’s flagship LTE-compliant devices. Evolved Wireless, LLC v. Samsung Electronics Co., et al., 1:15-cv-00545 (D. Del., filed June 25, 2015). The case was affirmed on appeal.

Currently, she is representing Samsung as the lead trial and appeal counsel in a patent and breach of contract case in the Southern District of New York against Australian technology company Kannuu. Kannuu v. Samsung Electronics Co., et al, 1:19-cv-04297 (S.D. N.Y., filed May 10, 2019).

She was able to defeat Kannuu’s request for injunction where Kannuu argued that a forum selection clause in the nondisclosure agreement that was allegedly breached by Samsung barred Samsung from pursuing inter partes review in the U.S. Patent Office.

She argued the case before the Federal Circuit, which affirmed on the issue of first impression. The district court case is currently stayed pending the Federal Circuit appeal of Maroulis’ team’s invalidation of several Kannuu patents by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board.

“We got a favorable decision that was significant because it addressed something called ‘forum selection clause,’ where in every agreement, you can include a clause explaining where a lawsuit has to be brought if the agreement is allegedly breached,” Maroulis explained.

“This case was quite significant, not just for Samsung, but the tech industry as a whole because nondisclosure agreements are very common. And if each one of them would be constrained to prevent you from challenging a patent in the patent office, that would significantly lessen defendants’ abilities to look at the validity of the patents in multiple forums.”

—Devon Belcher