Latham Shuts the Door on Patent Infringement Claims at Trial

Latham secured a huge victory in a jury trial in the Eastern District of Texas for Overhead Door against its competitor Chamberlain Group LLC. In retaliation to the a suit Latham filed in the International Trade Commission against Chamberlain (where Chamberlain was found to infringe three Overhead patents and Latham obtained exclusion orders due to go into full effect on April 9, 2022), Chamberlain brought suit in the Eastern District of Texas on four patents, seeking more than US$60 million in damages and an injunction. Trial was then set for 11 months from when Chamberlain filed the suit.

Latham methodically cut through Chamberlain’s claims—and won a rare partial summary judgment, which left Chamberlain with only a single claim on that patent as to which Chamberlain was seeking the vast majority of damages. At trial, Latham went on the offensive from day 1–rarely even mentioning damages during the trial, and not at all in closing. Instead, our theme was “we don’t infringe,” and that Chamberlain had stolen the invention from an industry standards committee.

On March 11, 2022, just 45 minutes after closing arguments, the jury returned a resoundingly one-sided verdict, finding that all three remaining patents were not infringed, and two of them (including the one with essentially all the damages) were invalid.

The team was led by partners David Callahan (who did opening and closing arguments), Ken Schuler, and Giri Pathmanaban, as well as counsel Susan Tull, partner Clement Naples and associates Bradley Hyde, Stephen Maniscalco, Daniel Todd, Takashi Okuda, Raj Patel, Rebecca Neubauer, Kelley Storey, Aaron Macris, and Shira Mendelson.

The team also included local counsel Michael Smith of Scheef & Stone and Leon Carter of Carter Arnett.