You may as well just call it Bed, Bath & Money. A group of Dallas Fish & Richardson intellectual property lawyers said Tuesday that they scored $932,000 in attorney’s fees for their work on New Jersey-based Bed Bath & Beyond’s patent infringement victory over Inventor Holdings in August 2015.
Inventor Holdings sued Bed Bath & Beyond in April 2014 in Delaware federal court, alleging Bed Bath & Beyond had infringed on its U.S. Patent 6,381,582, which involved technology to enable situations in which customers place an order for goods over the phone or the web but actually pay for their order at a local store.
In August 2015, after guidance from the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2014 decision in Alice Corp. v CLS Bank International, the Delaware district court granted Fish’s Section 101 invalidity motion, which invalidated all the claims in the patent and dismissed the case.
The Federal Circuit affirmed the lower court’s decision in May 2016. That same month, the district court awarded Bed Bath & Beyond its attorneys’ fees under the exceptional case doctrine (from the date Alice was decided). The Alice decision held that abstract ideas implemented on a computer are not patent-eligible. In its decision, the district court found that Inventor Holdings should have known its case was not strong enough to proceed post-Alice, therefore it should have dropped the case.
Friday’s affirmation of Bed Bath & Beyond’s attorneys’ fees marks the second win for Fish in the Federal Circuit in this case.
“We are thrilled to have helped Bed Bath & Beyond win on all fronts when confronted with a meritless claim for patent infringement,” Fish principal David Conrad, who argued the first appeal on the merits, said in a statement. “This decision is also notable because it was successfully argued by a Fish associate, Ricardo Bonilla, as part of Fish’s efforts to see that talented junior lawyers can demonstrate their skills in court.
Bonilla added that the Fish team is “excited to recover fees incurred defending Inventor Holdings’ baseless charge of infringement.
“Our client’s in-house team had the courage to see this case through to the just end. All of the other defendants in the lawsuit took an early exit, but we were confident in our case from the very beginning and applaud our client for making the right strategic decisions every step of the way,” Bonilla said in a written statement.
Fish’s appellate team also included Dallas principal Neil McNabnay.
Inventor Holdings’ lead lawyer, Richard C. Weinblatt, did not respond to a request for comment.