Intellectual Property Litigation

Intellectual property is a critical, valuable part of your business. It can also be leveraged unfairly to disrupt your legitimate business goals. Having represented both plaintiffs and defendants, our firm is adept at both protecting intellectual property and protecting your business from accusations of infringement. 

Our substantive experience spans the entire IP spectrum: patent, trademark, copyright, trade secret, and domain name disputes. Because of the breadth of our practice areas, our attorneys have found themselves litigating IP disputes in multiple venues across the country, including district courts, appellate courts (including the Federal Circuit), and arbitration tribunals, such as WIPO, the USPTO, and the ITC in Section 337 investigations. We have litigated over 100 IP disputes in federal court.

Representing a decorated scientist and professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego, in two separate lawsuits brought against him and a biotechnology company. In the action filed in federal district court in San Diego, Plaintiff alleged that DTO’s client infringed certain patents in developing breakthrough immunotherapies for the treatment of cancer. In a separate case filed in the Superior Court of San Diego, Plaintiff alleges that Defendant breached a non-compete clause in his scientific advisor agreement with Plaintiff when he co-founded the biotech company. Plaintiff’s theory of patent-infringement reaches well beyond Defendant’s work and, if Plaintiff were to prevail on its theory, would bring important cancer research throughout the field to halt. DTO Law recently secured a claim construction order ruling that the patents do not cover induced pluripotent stem cells, the technology its client uses as a foundation for his work. Using that order and information obtained in discovery, DTO Law positioned the patent-infringement case for a likely dismissal on summary judgment. In June 2023, Plaintiff voluntarily dismissed its patent-infringement claims against DTO’s client with prejudice. The case is set for trial in the summer of 2024.

Represented multiple Defendants in over a dozen copyright cases brought by fabric houses and designers alleging infringing use of a fabric design in a garment sold online or in a brick-and-mortar store. 

Represented Plaintiff automobile company in a patent infringement lawsuit alleging that Defendant’s wheels infringed certain design patents. After months of intense litigation, the case was resolved amicably.

DTO lawyer, Will Delgado, was brought in to try this patent infringement case on behalf of Defendant. At the time of trial, Defendant had already stipulated to infringement, so the trial focused on damages. At trial, Plaintiff attempted to secure a finding of “willful infringement’ and a total award approaching $5 million. Instead, the jury returned a finding of “no willful infringement” and a verdict of less than $200,000. On appeal, Plaintiff argued the district court had improperly instructed the jury on the issue of willfulness and asked that the case be remanded for further proceedings on that issue. DTO lawyers convinced the Federal Circuit to affirm the trial court’s jury instruction, leaving the much smaller award intact, and ending any further action.