Lawrence M. Hadley

Lawrence M. Hadley chairs Glaser Weil's intellectual property department, and he is proud to say it's well and growing well. He has added new lawyers who do entertainment, copyright and trademark work. The department has also gained an IP transactions attorney for the first time. "We've got, I think, a pretty even mixture of copyright, trademark, trade secret and patent infringement work," Hadley said.

Over the past year, he has done all those kinds of work himself. But that isn't all. "One of the things about our firm is that we all do a little bit of everything. I do IP, but we all do any kind of complex litigation." He is, for instance, handling an accounting malpractice case.

An odd piece of litigation that Hadley is defending began as a trade secrets case that he didn't handle. The client came to him for help after being hit with a $1 million arbitration award. In trying to enforce the judgment, the winning plaintiffs had sued and obtained restraining orders freezing bank accounts of 27 separate oil and gas and restaurant companies into which Hadley's client had invested money from a dozen investor funds he manages. The plaintiffs claimed all that money belonged to the client. "They don't get that it's investor money," he said.

Hadley managed to block a preliminary injunction and to get the companies' bank accounts unfrozen. "But a lot of the damage had been done already," he said. Morris v. Lee, 30-2021-01234127 (O.C. Super. Ct., filed Dec. 2, 2021).

On April 1, Hadley argued an unusual case at the Federal Circuit. He represents a former TRW part-time employee who, in his spare time, invented a novel way to boost fiber optic cable's data capacity. He licensed it to several other companies, but in later litigation, they claimed TRW owned the patent because TRW was paying his PhD tuition when he invented it. "The issue at the federal circuit basically was whether payment of tuition converts time that would otherwise be an employee's own time into the employer's time," Hadley said. Core Optical Technologies LLC v. Nokia Corp., 2023-1001 (Fed. Cir, filed Oct. 3, 2022).

Other cases include patent litigation over orthopedic screws, trade secrets litigation between companies that sell blood products and trademark litigation for a little basketball game called Pop-A-Shot.

Hadley also is suing Apple and Samsung for infringing his client's patents on technology that allows touchscreens to function in bad weather. The two tech giants filed "seven or eight IPRs challenging the [patent] claims with every piece of prior art in the world that you could think of," he said. After three Federal Circuit appeals the two cases are now back in District Courts.

-- Don DeBenedictis