Amy E. Proctor

Patents, Damages

Los Angeles

If there is a theme to Amy Proctor's practice as a patent litigator, it is to apply the scientific method to solving legal problems.

"That includes a whole range of activities, including my work on patent damages where we use these scientific tools to really understand patented inventions' technical benefits, but then also quantify the economic value of those benefits," she said.

Proctor and her colleagues achieved some stunning results with that particular approach for client VLSI Technology in a pair of patent infringement trials against Intel Corp in 2022. In the most recent, she co-led an Irell team that won a $948 million jury verdict in a trial over technology that improves performance and scalability of the microprocessors in servers. She led the presentation of both the technical and economic aspects of VLSI's damages case. The jury awarded exactly the amount the team asked for. VLSI Technology LLC v. Intel Corp., 1:19-cv-00977 (W.D. Tex., filed April 11, 2019).

That was in November 2022. Eight months earlier, Proctor had presented the damages evidence in a separate case between the same companies that resulted in a jury awarding her client $2.3 billion -- the largest patent judgment in U.S. history. On Intel's appeal, the Federal Circuit in early December sent the case back to the trial court to recalculate those damages. VLSI Technology LLC v. Intel Corp., 2022-1906 (Fed. Cir., dec'd Dec. 4, 2023).

Lately, Proctor has been working on licensing negotiations she can't disclose in detail. Additionally, she is a principal member of a team evaluating potential competitive patents for a client that is developing plans for two new major product launches.

For part of that work, she can turn to a new addition to Irell's unusual in-house Technical Analysis Laboratory, which she co-leads. The lab can handle many tasks, such as tearing down a product for close inspection. The firm is expanding it to include a wet lab for chemical tests.

A new tool there that Proctor is especially proud of is the Irell Programmable Patent Platform, "an AI-powered platform for analyzing and understanding U.S. patents and applications," she said. It is "entirely in-house and uses code that we wrote inside the firm."

The IP3, as they call it, was designed "specifically for analyzing large patent portfolios, often in a pre-litigation or licensing type scenario," she said. It is "completely customizable" to answer specific questions that arise in particular cases.

Proctor said she has used the lab and the IP3 in a number of her cases -- including one for the Loyola Innocence Project. Jane Dorotik was convicted in 2002 of murdering her husband and spent the next two decades in prison. Using the Irell lab, Proctor and its co-director Thomas Barr reanalyzed and refuted some of the crucial forensic evidence from the original trial. In May 2022, a San Diego Superior Court judge granted prosecutors' motion to dismiss the murder case. People v. Dorotik, SCN109628 (S.D. Super. Ct., filed Feb. 22, 2000).

-- Don DeBenedictis