Callie A. Bjurstrom

Callie Bjurstrom has more than 25 years of experience in intellectual property litigation and spent the first half decade of her litigation career handling and trying complex product liability cases and working with engineers defending the design and operation of numerous products in the automotive, aircraft and medical device industries.

"I love learning new and interesting technology," she said. "I also love the challenge of taking something incredibly complex and finding a way to make it understandable to the average person."

Bjurstrom continued: "As time went on, I transitioned that experience to handling all different types of IP cases, including technical trade secret and patent cases. I love trial work, and since IP cases tend to be bet-the-company cases and tried more often, I gravitated to these cases."

More recently, she was lead trial lawyer in two high profile cases for a well-known medical device company in Southern California. Both cases were against the same competitor, one for patent infringement and the other for misappropriation of trade secrets, Bjurstrom said.

She added both also related to the development of her client's best-in-class products used to treat neurovascular diseases of the brain.

The trade secrets case was also filed against certain executives of the competitor who had formerly worked for her client and had taken tens of thousands of highly confidential documents with them when they left, Bjurstrom said. These individuals used those highly confidential documents to develop competing medical device products for Bjurstrom's client's competitor.

"After years of contentious litigation, and on the eve of trial in the patent case, we were able to secure a fantastic settlement of both cases against the competitor for our client," she said. "We were also able to secure a consent judgment and permanent injunction, among other things, against our client's former employees."

Bjurstrom said one of the most significant challenges in the trade secrets matter was that opposing parties engaged in a deliberate pattern of obstruction designed to prevent her team from gaining access to clearly discoverable information.

"Over a two-year period, we were forced to bring 35 motions to compel, all of which we won. Once we obtained access to the discovery we sought, including access to numerous electronic devices and accounts, we uncovered not only the massive theft of our client's highly confidential information, but also the deliberate attempts to destroy that evidence," she said. "This ultimately led to our filing of two motions for sanctions which were both granted, resulting in written decisions totaling over 100 pages. The District Court for the Central District of California awarded harsh sanctions against the offending defendants, granting our client mandatory adverse jury instructions and monetary sanctions, among other things."