An attorney at a Midwest law firm hired us to provide an expert opinion and to serve as a witness,
on the side of the plaintiff, in a patent infringement lawsuit concerning an automated commercial cooking appliance.
The single-purpose cooker used an automated temperature control and cooking sequence to produce the end-user’s food
product without depending on operator intervention. This provided the manufacturer with a major competitive advantage,
created a more productive system for the end-user customer and a better and more consistent food product.
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The manufacturer had hired the attorney’s law firm to file a complaint against a rival company whom they could see was
infringing on a design patent concerning the construction of their system. Since the competitor appeared to be infringing on that patent,
it was suspected that they were also infringing on other of the plaintiff’s patents.
We received copies of the company’s patent portfolio and reviewed the patents and claims. We then obtained a sample of the competitor’s system.
We set it up and verified that it operated properly, in accordance with the written operating instructions and descriptions.
We then completed a reverse-engineering analysis of the system and wrote up a description of how the mechanics of the system operated and how the electronic controls functioned.
We built a claim chart which detailed how the competitor’s product violated our client’s patents. We also produced a report from our analysis which
detailed the operation and functional details of the system to back up the claim chart. This led to an amendment of the complaint to include the additional violations that we had discovered.
The defendant then counter-claimed that their control system did not violate our client’s patents since the original patents described
a purely analog control system and they had used digital logic in place of the electromechanical controls of our client’s system.
We wrote an additional report which showed that the digitization of the thermocouple output and its use to flip a digital switch was
functionally equivalent to our client’s analog approach.
Lacking any further supporting arguments, the defendant agreed to settle the suit and to pay damages on past sales as well as legal costs and to pay license fees on products going forward. Their products are being produced under these terms today.
