August 7, 2009 (San Francisco, CA) – Michael Sacksteder, Partner in the Patent Litigation Group at Fenwick & West LLP, was quoted in The Recorder article "Joint Defense in Patent Cases May Leave One Player Standing."

When a patent holder files an infringement claim against multiple offenders at one time, attorneys of co-defendants often join forces to share information and create a joint defense agreement to utilize more force against a common battle. Despite good intentions, it’s more often than not that a majority of the defendants settle leaving just one party left in battle in court alone, or the strongest defendant settles leaving the majority of the defendants left to trial with less information and bigger bills.

To prevent these "rate-trapped" situations, defendants are pooling together their money to hire a single law firm to represent them as a group. This tactic reduces the chances that one party will be left alone with a trial. However Michael Sacksteder warns clients that their interests may be lost if the firm has to fight for the great good of the group. "It could be [that] a claim construction issue comes up, and claim construction A is good for one client, and claim construction B is good for [another]," Sacksteder said. "You definitely need to have an oar in the water when you're in one of these joint defense groups," he said.

The entire article is available on The Recorder website (subscription required).

About the Fenwick & West Intellectual Property Litigation Group

Fenwick & West attorneys have handled some of the most prominent IP litigation over the past two decades, including securing one of the largest IP litigation settlements of 2005—a $400M settlement for its client Compuware against IBM—and one of the largest patent verdicts of the past eighteen months, a $74.7M patent litigation verdict for client Asyst Technologies against Jenoptik. The firm is ranked by Managing Intellectual Property as one of the top five West coast firms for IP litigation, by IP Worldwide as one of the top dozen firms that Fortune 500 companies relied on for IP litigation, and was recently awarded "Most Innovative Use of Technology by a Law Firm" by American Lawyer Media for the firm's proprietary electronic discovery tools.