Bingham McCutchen

I'll research the firm's profile and the tracked cases before writing.

Bingham McCutchen LLP — patent litigation profile

Firm overview. Bingham McCutchen LLP was a Boston-headquartered full-service firm (One Federal Street), founded in 1891 and grown through a long series of absorptions of other firms. At its peak it reported roughly 1,000–1,100 lawyers across about 14 offices, including New York, Washington DC, Hartford, Los Angeles, Orange County, San Francisco, Santa Monica, Silicon Valley/East Palo Alto, Lexington (KY), London, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Beijing. Contemporary reporting (Daily Journal's 2012 ranking of the largest California firms) listed about 1,016 lawyers firmwide and 14 offices. This was a general-practice AmLaw-tier firm with a litigation department, not an IP boutique or regional patent shop. Important: the firm dissolved in November 2014, when 226 of its partners and roughly 548 lawyers joined Morgan Lewis in what was structured as a mass lateral hire rather than a merger. Bingham ceased practicing law; the two tracked matters below both predate that wind-down, so any current-market characterization of this practice must be read as legacy history.

IP litigation specialty. Bingham's IP group was organized as an "Intellectual Property Litigation and Patent Prosecution Practice Group" with co-leaders on the West Coast, and it recruited senior patent litigators laterally (notably a five-partner DLA Piper IP group in 2013, led by Richard de Bodo, who became co-chair of the IP and Life Sciences groups). The tracked docket reflects two distinct technology clusters: life-sciences/biotech microarray technology (the Affymetrix matter, N.D. Cal.) and consumer-electronics display/LED backlight technology (the Innovative Display Technologies matter, E.D. Tex.). Non-tracked public filings show the group also handled Wi-Fi positioning and smartphone-technology disputes (e.g., Bingham attorneys appeared for Google in Skyhook Wireless v. Google, D. Mass.) and IP work supporting the firm's large Japan practice. The group's marketed strengths were electronics, semiconductors, medical devices, biologics and pharmaceutical patent litigation.

Side preference. The tracked record is balanced but small—one plaintiff-side and one defendant-side appearance—so it supports only a weak inference. In the plaintiff matter Bingham represented the patent owner/commercializing innovator (Affymetrix), and in the defendant matter it represented an operating company accused by a non-practicing entity (Innovative Display Technologies LLC, a Texas NPE asserting Jeffery Parker LED backlight patents). Public non-tracked filings, such as Bingham's representation of Google in the Skyhook Wireless dispute and of Alere Medical as plaintiff, point the same way: a defense-leaning operating-company practice with a recurring patent-owner/enforcement component in life sciences, rather than a plaintiff-side NPE/PAE prosecution shop.

Notable tracked matters. (1) Affymetrix, Inc. v. Synteni, Inc., filed in the Northern District of California in November 1998—an early gene-chip/microarray patent action in which Affymetrix was plaintiff and Bingham's Mark C. Fleming (East Palo Alto) appeared as counsel. (2) Innovative Display Technologies LLC v. Research in Motion Limited, No. 2:13-cv-00526 (E.D. Tex., Marshall Div., filed June 28, 2013), in which Monica A. Hernandez of Bingham served as lead counsel for RIM; IDT asserted seven "Light Emitting Panel Assemblies" patents against RIM and other mobile-device makers. I could not verify public outcomes (verdict, settlement terms, or appeal) for either matter from citable sources; readers should treat reported results as unconfirmed. The IDT patent family did later become the subject of multiple IPR proceedings, but those petitions were filed by other parties, not Bingham.

PTAB/IPR and practice leaders. Bingham's independent life coincided with only the first two years of AIA post-grant practice (IPR/PGR began September 2012; the firm dissolved in late 2014). Public evidence of a substantial Bingham IPR practice is thin: the Tokyo IP partner Chris Mizumoto publicly described advising clients on AIA post-grant review and IPR proceedings, and IPR work by firm clients during 2012–2014 is documented, but I found no reliable public report quantifying Bingham's IPR/PGR filing volume, so no scale figure should be asserted. On leadership, the best-sourced names are Richard Taffet (co-chair, IP group), William F. Abrams (named Silicon Valley managing partner and co-leader of the IP Litigation and Patent Prosecution Practice Group in 2008), Richard de Bodo (co-chair, IP and Life Sciences, from 2013), and James G. Snell (co-chair, IP group, who left for Perkins Coie). Of the named attorneys in the tracked list, Mark C. Fleming and Susan Baker Manning have the clearest public patent-litigation footprints; the individual roles of Monica A. Hernandez and John A. Polito are not well documented in accessible sources.