David Hadden

David Hadden specializes in patent litigation as a Fenwick & West LLP partner. He has a record of resolving cases by securing summary judgment — a rarity in patent litigation. He’s been with the firm since 2001, and along with his Yale Law School degree, he has a summa cum laude with honors degree in physics from Yale University.

In January 2023, patent research site Patexia named him the No. 1 best-performing patent litigation attorney.

“I’m fortunate and busy, and whatever is going on in the economy doesn’t affect us very much,” Hadden said.

He’s currently defending a $5.4 million fee award at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit for client Amazon.com. A hearing on the fee issue is set for June. In re: PersonalWeb Technologies LLC, 2020-1566 (F. Cir., filed March 17, 2020).

Hadden won the big fee for his work obtaining stays of litigation against 80-plus Amazon Web Services customers and then winning summary judgment of non-infringement on the plaintiff’s claims. Plaintiff PersonalWeb Technologies LLC lost its appeal at the Federal Circuit and its bid for certiorari at the U.S. Supreme Court.

In another case, Hadden won $400,000 in fees even though the other side dismissed its complaints against Netflix in a dispute over video compression technology.

The plaintiff originally filed in the District of Delaware, where a judge found four of its patents invalid for ineligible subject matter. The plaintiff then voluntarily dismissed the case and refiled the same claims as two separate suits in the Central District of California. Realtime Adaptive Streaming LLC v. Netflix Inc. et al., 2:19-cv-06361 and 2-19-cv-06359 (C.D. Cal., filed July 23, 2019).

“The other side was trying to avoid Delaware, where the shoe was about to drop, by refiling in the Central District,” Hadden said. U.S. District Judge George H. Wu didn’t go for it. “He agreed it was game-playing and awarded us fees under his inherent powers.”

Hadden led the Fenwick team that obtained summary judgment for Amazon.com against a plaintiff that asserted five patents related to Prime Video’s video-on-demand technology and sought more than $1 billion in damages. Broadband ITV Inc. v. Amazon.com Inc. et al., 6:20-cv-00921 (W.D. Texas, filed Oct. 6, 2020).

The case was before U.S. District Judge Alan D. Albright of Waco, Texas. “At the final pretrial conference, we moved for summary judgment. Judge Albright took a short recess, then came back and killed all five patents,” Hadden said. “That was pretty rare, and our local counsel was quite surprised.”

—John Roemer