Mass Law Blog
Intellectual property and business litigation, Massachusetts and nationallyWritten by humans
Lee Gesmer’s Mass Law Blog began in 2005, and contains almost 600 posts. The site initially focused on Massachusetts law, but today it follows business and intellectual property law nation-wide. The site is hosted by Gesmer Updegrove LLP, a law firm based in Boston, Massachusetts. The firm represents startup and established companies in the areas of litigation, transactions (including financings, mergers and acquisitions), IP rights, taxation, employment law, standards consortia, business counseling and open source development projects and foundations. You can find a summary of the firm’s services here. To learn how Gesmer Updegrove can help you, contact: Lee Gesmer
A Postcript on EDtTx
A postcript on my last posting regarding the so-called "rocket docket" in the Eastern District of Texas. Our firm is counsel for a client in a patent suit filed in Marshall, Texas (the very heart of darkness for patent defendants, some would say) on November 2, 2007. To date (more than six months later), the Court has yet to schedule the initial case management conference which, under the local patent rules, is the "kick off" event for patent cases in EDtTx. To date, there has been almost no...
Popping A Bubble in Texas
"a renegade jurisdiction" Justice Antonin Scalia, referring to Marshall, Texas, during oral argument in eBay v. Mercexchange ______________________ There are all kinds of bubbles - stocks, commodities, housing, tulip bulbs, and even litigation. The Eastern District of Texas (EDtTx) has been the scene of a patent law bubble for the last seven years. However, like all bubbles, it can't last forever, and it's only a matter of time before this one pops. The patent litigation history of EDtTx and...
Patent Reexamination Used to Stall Patent Enforcement
Here's a link to an interesting article in the May 5, 2008 issue of Forbes, that highlights the use of anonymous, ex parte requests for reexamination of issued patents to the Patent Office. The result of a reexamination is to stall enforcement of the patent. The article highlights the plight of Anthony Brown, a lawyer who purchased the patent for compression of an electronic file for transmission over a communications line (think JPEG, this ubiquitous). Before Brown purchased this patent it...
EDTex Giveth, CAFC Taketh Away
One of the largest jury verdicts in the notoriously plaintiff- friendly Federal District Court for the Eastern District of Texas was the June 2006 $79 million jury award, enhanced for wilfulnes by $25 million by U.S. District Judge Ron Clark in the case of Finisar Corporation v. DirectTV. (Note: Texas judges often have nicknames as their legal first names. It's a Texas thing. If he were Massachusetts bred, he'd be Ronald Harrison Clark, III). In addition to this award, the judge refused...
This site is hosted by Gesmer Updegrove LLP, a technology law firm based in Boston, Massachusetts. You can find a summary of our services here. To learn how GU can help you, contact:
Lee Gesmer