Henry & O'Donnell

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Henry & O'Donnell, P.C. — Patent Litigation Practice Summary

Firm overview. Henry & O'Donnell, P.C. is a small, Virginia-based general commercial firm headquartered at 300 N. Washington Street in Alexandria, VA, with a historical Fairfax presence and matters reached in the state and federal courts of Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia (henrylaw.com). It is not a BigLaw firm, an IP boutique, or a patent prosecution shop: its self-described core practices are bankruptcy and financial restructuring, creditors' rights/banking, commercial and business litigation, business law, and commercial real estate. The firm holds a Chambers USA ranking in Bankruptcy/Restructuring — Virginia, with ranked lawyers Bruce W. Henry and Kevin O'Donnell; no AmLaw ranking or IP-specific Chambers/ranked practice is in evidence. Third-party directory listings suggest a roster of only a handful of attorneys — no reliable headcount, revenue or attorney-count figure is publicly sourced, so none is stated here.

IP litigation specialty. The firm's IP work is narrow and structural rather than a standalone patent practice. Its own litigation page lists "Intellectual Property Disputes" as one bullet among a commercial-litigation portfolio dominated by contract, business-tort, fiduciary-duty and real-estate disputes (henrylaw.com/litigation). The tracked patent matters are all cybersecurity/network-security cases — specifically the Centripetal Networks family of suits over threat-intelligence and network-packet filtering patents (Centripetal's "threat intelligence gateway" technology) against Cisco Systems, Keysight Technologies and Palo Alto Networks. There is no evidence in the tracked docket of Wi-Fi standards, pharmaceutical, semiconductor, or mechanical patent work. The substantive technology expertise sits with out-of-town lead counsel; this firm's contribution is forum-specific.

Side preference. All 11 tracked appearances are recorded plaintiff-side (11 plaintiff / 0 defendant), and 11 of 11 are as local counsel, with one additional co-counsel role. That asymmetry should not be read as an ideological plaintiff/NPE orientation. It reflects the firm's function as Virginia local counsel of record in the Eastern District of Virginia — filing pro hac vice motions and serving as resident counsel for national litigation firms (in Centripetal v. Cisco, for example, the firm sponsored pro hac vice admission of Kramer Levin's Paul J. Andre, Lisa Kobialka and James R. Hannah). The practical implication: this firm is retained for its EDVA residency and procedural fluency, not for case-selection or plaintiff-side strategy. Note also that two tracked entries are captioned Palo Alto Networks, Inc. v. Centripetal Networks — parallel declaratory-judgment/mirror proceedings in which the client relationship appears to run the other direction; the "plaintiff" label in the tracked data may not reflect actual client alignment in those entries.

Notable cases and outcomes. The flagship matter is Centripetal Networks, Inc. v. Cisco Systems, Inc. (E.D. Va. No. 2:18-cv-00094), where Centripetal was awarded a $2.75 billion judgment in October 2020 — reported as the largest patent damages award in U.S. history. The Federal Circuit vacated that judgment on recusal grounds (the trial judge's spouse's stock ownership), 38 F.4th 1039 (Fed. Cir. 2022), and on rehearing before a new district judge Cisco prevailed on non-infringement, with the court finalizing that outcome in June 2024 (Law360). A separate EDVA jury returned a $151.5 million verdict for Centripetal against Palo Alto Networks on January 31, 2024, on four patents (Reuters). The docket set also includes Centripetal v. Keysight Technologies (No. 2:22-cv-00002) and Federal Circuit Appeal No. 2024-2373; outcomes for the Keysight matters and that appeal are not established by the sources reviewed and should not be characterized without confirmation. The firm's own publicity does not claim these results as its wins.

PTAB / IPR. There is no public evidence of a firm-level IPR, PGR or PTAB practice, and no reported filing volume attributable to Henry & O'Donnell. The IPR activity in the Centripetal–Cisco dispute ran against this firm's client: Cisco filed numerous IPRs between July and September 2018 against nine of the eleven asserted Centripetal patents, and the PTAB invalidated several of them (per the district court's findings of fact). Anyone evaluating this firm for PTAB work should treat that as outside its demonstrated scope.

Key partners / practice leaders. The dominant figure in the tracked patent docket is Kevin M. O'Donnell (Virginia bar since 1989; George Mason J.D.; Chambers-ranked and a repeated Super Lawyers designee in bankruptcy and business litigation), who appears in 9 of 11 entries and handles the local-counsel filings. Jeffery T. Martin, Jr. also appears for Centripetal in the Cisco matter. Bruce W. Henry is the other Chambers-ranked name, but in bankruptcy/restructuring rather than IP. No partner at this firm is publicly identified as an IP litigation specialist or ranked in an IP category, which is the central caveat for any engagement evaluation: this is a competent EDVA local-counsel relationship firm, not an IP litigation practice in the conventional sense.