Brown McCarroll

I'll research Brown McCarroll's profile, its IP practice, and the attorneys named.

Brown McCarroll, L.L.P. — Patent Litigation Practice Summary

Firm overview. Brown McCarroll, L.L.P. was a Texas-based, full-service regional firm founded in 1938, with principal offices in Austin (111 Congress Ave.) and Dallas (1900 N. Pearl St.) and additional offices in Houston, Longview, and — per some directory listings — El Paso. This was not a BigLaw firm or an IP boutique: public directory listings describe it as a multi-disciplinary Texas/Southwest practice, with practice groups measured in the dozens of attorneys rather than hundreds. The firm no longer exists as an independent entity — it combined with Husch Blackwell on July 15, 2013, and its lawyers now practice under the Husch Blackwell name. I could not locate a reliable AmLaw or Chambers ranking for Brown McCarroll as a standalone firm; any statement that it held a specific AmLaw rank would be unsupported.

IP litigation specialty. Brown McCarroll's patent work was concentrated in its Longview office, which functioned as an Eastern District of Texas litigation outpost. Technology areas appearing in the public record include: check imaging and financial-services document processing (the DataTreasury campaign), mobile email and data synchronization (Visto Corp. v. Seven Networks), video/image compression (Compression Labs, Inc. v. Adobe Systems, et al.), semiconductor and music-chip technology (Agere Systems v. Sony), and ophthalmic/contact lens technology (Rembrandt Vision Technologies). The firm's own published practice description was generic (intellectual property, business litigation, product liability); its patent identity came from the Longview group's courtroom presence in Marshall and Tyler, not from a branded IP practice.

Side preference — mixed, predominantly as local counsel. The tracked data shows one appearance, on the defendant side (DataTreasury Corp. v. NCR Corp.), with the firm acting as local counsel. Public docket records, however, show the same Longview lawyers appearing on the plaintiff side in other matters — for example, as counsel for plaintiff Compression Labs in the 2004 E.D. Tex. camera/codec litigation, and on the plaintiff's team in Agere v. Sony and Rembrandt Vision Technologies. Conversely, in Visto Corp. v. Seven Networks the Longview group appeared for the defendant Seven. The accurate characterization is a Texas local-counsel shop doing both sides, selected for E.D. Tex. procedural fluency rather than for a plaintiff- or defense-only patent practice. Note that the one tracked appearance is thin evidence of any broader pattern.

Notable cases and outcomes. DataTreasury Corp. v. NCR Corp. (E.D. Tex.) — the tracked case — settled in January 2006, with NCR paying DataTreasury an undisclosed sum and the parties granting each other access to their patented payment technologies. It was one piece of DataTreasury's sprawling check-imaging campaign, which later produced a $27 million jury verdict (March 2010) against U.S. Bank, Viewpointe and The Clearing House — though lead plaintiff's counsel in that trial was Nix, Patterson & Roach, not Brown McCarroll. Separately, a Texas jury returned an $18.5 million verdict against Sony in the Agere matter, with Calvin Capshaw of Brown McCarroll's Longview office on the Agere team, and Capshaw also appeared on the team that won a $41 million verdict in the Rembrandt contact-lens case. I have not verified a Federal Circuit merits decision attributable to the firm.

PTAB / IPR practice — effectively none traceable to this firm. Brown McCarroll dissolved into Husch Blackwell in July 2013, roughly the point at which the AIA inter partes review regime was becoming operative, so there is no meaningful IPR/PGR filing or defense record under the Brown McCarroll name. IPR exhibits that reference "Brown McCarroll – Longview" (e.g., IPR2015-00486) are prior district-court correspondence reproduced as exhibits, not evidence of the firm appearing as IPR counsel. I found no public report of an IPR-volume figure for the firm, and would caution against asserting one.

Key partners. The firm's patent-litigation identity rested on two lawyers in the Longview office: S. Calvin Capshaw III and Elizabeth L. "Betty" DeRieux. Both left in 2008 to form Capshaw DeRieux, L.L.P. in Gladewater, Texas — a three-attorney boutique positioned for E.D. Tex. patent work — where they continued as local counsel in matters including SimpleAir v. Google (an $85 million result in 2014) and NobelBiz v. Global Connect/TCN. A third name in the tracked data, Brian T. Hoyle, I was not able to independently verify as a Brown McCarroll patent practitioner from the sources reviewed; treat that attribution as unconfirmed.

Sourcing note: firm founding date, offices and 2013 Husch Blackwell combination come from Martindale directory listings, a UT CLE sponsor page, and Husch Blackwell's own 2013 announcement; case outcomes come from American Banker, Digital Transactions, Finovate and Southeast Texas Record reporting, plus federal court filings on Justia and PTAB records. Attorney counts, revenue and rankings for Brown McCarroll are not reliably sourceable and are omitted.