After reading short briefs from the parties on the subject of “equivalent” infringement, U.S. District Judge William Alsup opted on Thursday to hand Amazon.com a complete win in the suit from a Dutch company called MasterObjects Inc., stating that he’d incorrectly framed Amazon’s motion for summary judgment.
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“I have never been busier, with six trials in little more than a year,” explained John Hueston. The Daily Journal noted Mr. Hueston’s “demanding schedule of marquee cases which has enabled junior colleagues courtroom experience.”
“It’s been both exhilarating and exhausting, but, as I tell my colleagues, if you are to be real trial lawyers, you have to go to trial,” noted Moez Kaba. Mr. Kaba has tried four cases to verdict or judgment and prevailed in each.
Mr. Hueston and Mr. Kaba, as co-lead counsel for Monster, won a landmark
$175 million verdict plus 5% annual royalties and $10 million in attorney fees on counterclaims in a trademark showdown with the maker of a rival beverage known as Bang. The “big judgment” was upheld by a federal court, and will yield an “additional $40 million each year.”
Earlier in the year, Mr. Hueston and Mr. Kaba were lead counsel representing Endo Pharmaceuticals in California’s $50 billion statewide false advertising and unfair competition action against the makers of prescription painkillers.
“Our overall strategy from the start was to try to move the focus beyond the question of ‘Is there an opioid crisis,’” noted Mr. Hueston. “By the final closing argument, we had reduced the plaintiff’s case to a mere 11 Endo documents with alleged false statements out of millions produced.
A turning point was Mr. Kaba’s cross-examination of the government’s star witness,
Dr. Anna Lembke, regarding her opinions about allegedly false and misleading marketing. “Through cross examination, we were able to get her to admit that Endo extensively disclosed risks, that Endo faithfully, adhered to its FDA-approved label and that her issue was not with Endo’s marketing but rather with the FDA’s decision to allow opioid medications in the first place.”
The list recognizes the very best California attorneys who have made an impact on the law and society within the last year. Mr. Hueston has been named to the prestigious list for over a decade, and Mr. Kaba has been on the list for six consecutive years.
Click here to read Mr. Hueston’s full profile.
Click here to read Mr. Kaba’s full profile.
As a trial boutique, Hueston Hennigan LLP has teams preparing for trials throughout the year, and sometimes readying for back-to-back trials. The two say it can be hard — just “ask my husband and John’s wife,” Kaba said — but they have a method within their firm of preparing for trial, and it pans out.
Their Biggest Accomplishment Over the Past Year:
The duo’s back-to-back trials were, in themselves, a feat, they said. This summer, a California federal court confirmed an arbitration award that Hueston and Kaba won for Monster Energy Co., the energy drink maker.
Monster and a small company that sells a sweetened orange drink under the name Orange Bang had brought a dispute against the maker of Bang energy drinks, Vital Pharmaceuticals Inc. In 2010, Orange Bang Inc. settled a trademark fight with Vital, and Vital agreed to use the name “Bang” only for drinks with the amino acid creatine or drinks meant for stores’ nutritional supplement sections.
An arbitrator agreed Vital had breached the decade-old agreement and ordered it to pay $175 million to Orange Bang, plus a 5% quarterly royalty. Monster helped fund the litigation.
The trial came right after a landmark opioid case, and in that respect, “The quick sequencing of the trials has forced us to institutionalize what we think is our unique preparation and approach to trials,” Hueston said. They “bring along our associates on a fast learning curve [so they] know how outlines should be prepared and at what point,” among other skills, he said.
Other Notable Cases They Worked On:
Immediately before the Bang case, they represented Endo Pharmaceuticals in an opioid case that was of equal importance to them. A judge eventually found that four California communities failed during the landmark 2021 trial to show that four drugmakers, including Endo, were liable for an epidemic of opioid abuse. The Orange County judge rejected allegations that the companies created a “public nuisance” by flooding the communities with opioids. It was a long and grueling case, but Kaba said, “You focus entirely all of your energy on the case at hand and give it all you got.”
Hueston said it was never a given that they would be able to prevail. “It was a $50 billion action that, frankly, everybody thought — except for us and the client — that we would lose,” he said.
Their Advice for Less Experienced Lawyers:
Kaba said the most important thing is not to be afraid to find your voice in the courtroom.
“If you want to be a trial lawyer, you have to get up” and speak, Kaba said.
He added, “Take on the challenging legal issues, the challenging witnesses. It’s time-consuming, but it is the most rewarding way to develop your skills.”
He said that over the last year, more than half of the firm’s associates have “had speaking roles at trials, which is obviously everything we stand for.”
Their Biggest Challenge of the Last Year:
The two also said that being methodical but also ready to pivot whenever the need arises is difficult but central. Sometimes it means stepping away from family obligations or changing on the fly in a hearing with a judge.
Sometimes it even means departing one trial while it’s going on and coming back to it later. During the California opioid trial, Hueston actually had to leave for a week to go to Texas and work on an intellectual property trial.
“We made it work, and we won the trial in Texas, and I was able to rejoin,” Hueston said, coming back to relieve Kaba of the additional work he had taken on during what Hueston called the “biggest challenge of not just my last year but probably last 10 years.”
Reprinted with permission from Law360.
The awards dinner reception will take place at 7:00 p.m. on Thursday, November 3, 2022, at the JW Marriott, 515 Mason Street, in San Francisco.
The California Legal Awards celebrate the achievements of lawyers and companies leading technology, innovation and the profession as a whole.
