A federal district court recently awarded more than $12.4 million in attorneys’ fees to the defendants as “prevailing parties” based on its finding that the plaintiffs had pursued objectively baseless patent and trade secret misappropriation claims in bad faith. [See Gabriel Technologies Corp. v. Qualcomm Inc., No. 08 CV 1992, 2013 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 14105 (S.D. Cal. Feb. 1, 2013)] As part of the award, the court awarded $2,829,349.10 in fees “attributable to computer-assisted, algorithm-driven document review” developed and employed by H5, which is an e-discovery vendor that obtained a patent last year on certain aspects of its technology-assisted review process. The court found that the method of document review used in the case reduced the overall fees and attorney hours incurred by the defendants and, therefore, found the requested amount of fees to be reasonable.
In Gabriel Technologies, the plaintiffs brought suit in 2008 against Qualcomm Inc. and an individual defendant asserting ownership rights in numerous Qualcomm patents related to GPS technologies. The suit arose out of events related to technology licenses and joint ventures between the plaintiffs, and their predecessor in interest, and the defendants dating back to 1998. The plaintiffs initially asserted 11 claims for relief, including breaches of a 1999 license agreement and a 2006 license agreement, fraud, tortious interference with contract, correction of patent inventorship, declaration of patent ownership, equitable patent infringement, trade secret misappropriation, conversion, unfair competition and unjust enrichment, and sought more than $1 billion in damages. Most of the plaintiffs’ claims …