Lisa S. Glasser

Patent & Commercial Litigation

Newport Beach

Lisa Glasser has had what she called an "unusually rapid pace of trials" over the last several months. She won them all.

Between October and May, she put on four trials and assisted with a fifth. Four were patent trials in which she and her team won multimillion-dollar verdicts. Another was a breach of contract case in which a jury gave client Netlist the right to cancel a licensing deal with Samsung.

The key to maintaining that pace and that record of success is her colleagues, she said. "People ... sometimes say that trials are like a team sport, and there's some truth to that." Glasser tries all her cases together with partner Jason Sheasby. And Irell has many other excellent trial attorneys, plus a paralegal team "that is very trial savvy."

"If you're going to have five trials in six months, you really need to have a full, excellent, top-to-bottom team, which fortunately we do," she said.

Glasser's first victory in this recent run of trials was a $240 million jury verdict in mid-October for an inventor who developed improved type of "accelerated erasure coding" that dramatically boosts the efficiency of computer data storage systems. StreamScale Inc. v. Cloudera, 6:21-cv-00198 (W.D. Tex., filed March 2, 2021).

Trials two and three were a trial and retrial over a pair of 5G standard essential patents. In January, Glasser was part of a team that won $67.5 million for their client from Samsung. But then, the judge granted Samsung a new trial on damages over concerns about jury confusion. So in April, a new jury awarded Glasser's client $142 million instead. G+ Communications LLC v. Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., 2:22-cv-00078 (E.D. Tex., filed March 14, 2022).

"Normally if you're the plaintiff, you don't want to get your damages vacated and have to redo it, but we actually got more than twice as much on the retrial," she noted. "Sometimes that's a risk for a defendant."

The fourth trial was the contract case. Before Glasser's team took it over, the judge had ruled that Samsung had breached a contract with Netlist. But then, a jury awarded zero damages. Adding to the challenge, the 9th Circuit reversed the judge's ruling and required a jury to decide whether there had been a breach and if so whether it was material.

On May 17, the new jury said yes. "It was challenging because the jury was instructed that there had been no damages," she said. Netlist Inc. v. Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., 8:20-cv-00993 (C.D. Cal., filed May 28, 2020).

Just a week later, Glasser was back in Texas supporting Sheasby and Irell colleagues when they brought in a $445 million for Netlist in patent case. Netlist Inc. v. Micron Technology Texas LLC, 2:22-cv-00294 (E.D. Tex., filed Aug. 1, 2022).

She expects appeals in those cases. As for trials, "I don't have any trials on calendar right now for the rest of the summer. We'll see how long that lasts."

-- Don DeBenedictis