Brad Caldwell and a team of lawyers at Caldwell Cassady & Curry convinced a Delaware jury to award their client $57.1 million in a patent infringement case Friday.
A seven-person federal jury in Wilmington heard four days of testimony, deliberated for two hours and then unanimously found that a group of refined-coal plant operators affiliated with CERT Operations “willfully” violated the patented mercury-reducing technology of Corsicana-headquartered Midwest Energy Emissions Corp.
A complicated and confusing verdict form left some national news media outlets to wrongly report Friday night that the verdict was $114 million instead of the $57.1 million.
Midwest Energy, which is also known as ME2C, filed a lawsuit in 2019 alleging that numerous companies violated their patented SEA Technologies, which chemically treats coal on the front end and also captures mercury on the back end from emissions as it burns to make electricity. Multiple companies, including Arthur J. Gallagher & Co., DTE Energy Resources and Alistar Enterprises, settled with Midwest Energy prior to trial.
The practice of reducing mercury from the coal emissions became financially lucrative in 2010 because of hundreds of millions of dollars in tax credits that refined-coal operators receive annually.
The $57.1 million verdict is more than triple the total 2023 revenues of Midwest Energy, which has a market cap of $155 million.
Because the jury found that the defendants “willfully infringed” Midwest Energy’s patents, the lawyers at Caldwell Cassady can ask the judge, U.S. Magistrate Christopher Burke of the U.S. District of Delaware, to triple the damage award.
Other Caldwell Cassady lawyers who worked on the litigation include principals Justin Nemunaitis, Daniel Pearson and Warren McCarty, as well as attorneys Adrienne Dellinger, Aisha Mahmood Haley, and Richard Cochrane.
Lawyers at Bradley Arant, including Jeff Dyess, Paul Sykes and Benn Wilson, represented the CERT Operations defendants.
The case is Midwest Energy Emissions Corp., et al. v. Arthur J. Gallagher & Co., et al., No: 1:19-cv-01334.