Jason G. Sheasby

Jason G. Sheasby, a partner at Irell & Manella LLP, has achieved an impressive series of jury verdicts, each exceeding $100 million, with his partner Lisa Glasser over the past six years. In the span of 17 months, he has demonstrated remarkable success, leading five complex cases to trial and winning each, resulting in over $820 million in verdicts, a permanent injunction, and two key defense victories.

One of Sheasby’s notable victories was for Netlist Inc. against Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., where he secured a $303.15 million jury verdict in a case involving computer memory technology patents. Netlist Inc. v. Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. et al., 21-cv-00463 (E.D. Tex., filed Dec. 20, 2021).

The jury found willful infringement by Samsung and rejected Samsung’s argument that damages should be capped at $8 million. Sheasby effectively communicated the significance of Netlist’s technology to the jury, leading to a substantial award that far exceeded Samsung’s proposed limit.

Another significant case led by Sheasby was the City of Pomona v. SQM North America Corp., where he co-led the team to secure a $48 million jury verdict for the city of Pomona in an environmental tort trial related to the city’s polluted water supply. The case was groundbreaking in several ways, including being the first successful litigation holding SQMNA responsible for perchlorate contamination in the U.S., and the first time California’s strict products liability law was used successfully in an environmental tort. The team overcame significant challenges, including matching the pollution in Pomona wells to samples from mines controlled by SQMNA using isotope fingerprinting.

“The City of Pomona is a poor municipality in East Los Angeles County that has one extremely valuable asset — its water rights in an ancient aquifer. Many decades ago, a Chilean mining conglomerate sold tainted fertilizer in the region that leached into the water supply,” Sheasby said. “The taint has the potential to cause birth defects at high enough levels. We were able to find the conglomerate (controlled for some time by the son-in-law of Augusto Pinochet) and hold them to account. When we were hired on the matter the city had already lost twice at trial. We combed through records in the Pomona archives and national archives in Chile. These records allowed us to confirm the company sold fertilizer directly to cooperatives in Pomona.”