Behind the $525 Patent Verdict Against Amazon Web Services

Law, disrupted

John is joined by Christine Lehman, Managing Partner of the Washington, D.C. office of Reichman Jorgensen Lehman & Feldberg LLP and an accomplished trial attorney focusing on patent litigation. They discuss the $525 million verdict Christine and her team recently won against Amazon Web Services (AWS) for infringing tech company Kove’s patent rights in data-storage technology. Christine describes how she presented to the jury the journey of the inventor, John Overton, from his troubled youth in Kentucky, to majoring in religion in college, to developing a method to efficiently organize and index all the photographs he took on a yearlong bicycle trip across the country. He and co-inventor Stephen Bailey ultimately implemented this method in a way that allowed users to search millions of data items quickly and formed the basis for Kove’s patented technology. Christine also describes the extensive pretrial proceedings that occurred over the six years that the lawsuit against AWS was pending. John and Christine then discuss the ten-day trial itself, including the defendant’s last-minute decision to abandon its invalidity defense, the judge’s procedure for allowing jurors to submit questions to each witness, and how those questions informed her team about how well the jury understood the technical issues in the case. Finally, they discuss the different approaches taken by the two sides in presenting their experts and how Christine presented her client’s damages case leading to the $525 million verdict.

Podcast Link: Law-disrupted.fm
Host: John B. Quinn
Producer: Alexis Hyde
Music and Editing by: Alexander Rossi