Gary P. Naftalis

Gary P. Naftalis is firm co-chairman and a litigation partner at Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel LLP. He represents corporations, as well as officers, directors and significant individuals, in all phases of complex, high-stakes civil, criminal and regulatory matters.

His work over a career on behalf of these clients spans more than four decades and includes sensitive and high-profile matters, including governmental and regulatory inquiries and related civil litigation involving allegations of insider trading, market manipulation, accounting irregularities, stock options backdating and other financial fraud. Throughout his career, he has been one of the first calls for corporate leaders encountering legal problems.

Naftalis is currently working to defeat the plaintiffs’ appeal of a big defense win he and colleagues got last summer for longtime client Sirius XM Radio Inc. in a $400 million showdown with a German-based research organization with a host of patent infringement claims from the 1990s related to improvements in satellite radio broadcasting. Fraunhofer-Gessellschaft Zur Forderung Der Angewandten Forschung E.V. v. Sirius XM Radio Inc., 1:17-cv-00184 (D. Del., filed Feb. 22, 2017).

On July 10, 2023, Senior U.S. District Judge Joseph F. Bataillon granted summary judgment to Sirius. He asked the same question Naftalis had posed, noting that the plaintiffs had spent years doing business as usual with Sirius under a master licensing agreement without raising any claims: Why the wait?

Wrote the judge, “An undisputed record establishes a more than five-year period during which Fraunhofer’s silence and course of conduct (intentional or not) misled SXM into reasonably believing it still had a valid and Bankruptcy Court approved sublicense to the asserted patents…” That silence means the claims are equitably estopped, Bataillon held.

“As soon as Sirius got successful, Fraunhofer said, ‘We want your money,’” Naftalis said. “We worked hard on this one and got a great result.” He noted that the judge had decided the motion on the pleadings. “It was all our brief. I’m a generalist; I can do this stuff in writing, but I do look forward to oral argument. But we have a very happy client, so I’m happy to have done it on the papers.”

Naftalis noted that he’d earlier won a $330 million suit and an appeal by disc jockey Howard Stern against Sirius. Stern claimed the broadcaster did not pay him bonus stock awards he claimed were due. One Twelve Inc. et al. v. Sirius XM Radio Inc., 650762/11 (S. Ct. of State of N.Y., filed March 22, 2011).

“He had a huge contract and he wanted more,” Naftalis said. “That one I argued in the appeals court.”

—John Roemer