Notable Successes

Law360 named Desmarais LLP a 2022 Intellectual Property Practice Group of the Year, highlighting the firm’s associate training program and its key role in a $272.5 million trial victory, as well as the firm’s defeat of a $371 million patent infringement claim and a successful settlement with a $1.25 billion payout, plus royalties, that ended pharmaceutical litigation.
 
The firm’s associates played an important part in a September 2022 trial, representing the biotech company Ravgen against LabCorp, and helped secure a $272.5 million jury verdict with a finding of willful infringement. The trial team included lead counsel John Desmarais, partner Kerri-Ann Limbeek, and associates Benjamin Luehrs, Deborah Mariottini, Kyle Petrie, Jun Tong, and Joze Welsh.
 
Desmarais LLP serves as a “training ground for trial lawyers,” and that’s been a consistent part of the firm’s winning formula, said John Desmarais, founding partner.
 
“Even our most junior associates are thinking like trial lawyers,” Limbeek said. “We're thinking about the case from the perspective of ‘how are we going to present this to a jury, on summary judgment, on appeal.’ It makes our teams really strong from top to bottom.”
 
Each year, the firm’s associates, including summers, go through all the steps of a multi-day trial as part of their training.
 
“We have actors play witnesses. Sometimes we use the experts from our cases to play experts, we have people from the community play juries, partners are judges,” Desmarais said. “It's a very unique environment, because the whole firm is going through this program.”
 
In August 2022, Desmarais LLP also earned a full defense verdict of noninfringement for Cisco, defeating a $371 million patent claim brought by the software company Egenera. Desmarais and Tamir Packin were co-lead trial counsel.
 
“We had a very simple trial theme. The way our product worked was clearly not what the inventors invented in the patent,” Desmarais said.
 
In February 2022, the firm also a settled patent infringement suit against Gilead Sciences, earning a Desmarais LLP clients ViiV Healthcare and Shionogi & Co. a $1.25 billion upfront payment plus 3% royalties on future sales of Gilead's triple-drug HIV therapy, Biktarvy. The Desmarais LLP-led litigation was the first case brought under the doctrine of equivalents alleging infringement of a patent covering a molecule.
 
“We had to argue that what Gilead was doing was equivalent to ViiV. That's never been done before in the context of a chemical pharmaceutical claim,” Desmarais said. “Settlement negotiations began right at trial, and we got one of the largest settlements of all time.”
 
Read the Law360 story
 

John M. Desmarais

Kerri-Ann Limbeek

Deborah J. Mariottini

Kyle G. Petrie