San Diego – February 10, 2022 – An arbitration win by a Cooley team, led by partner Steve Strauss, was featured in the Daily Journal’s 2022 Top Verdicts special report, which showcases the largest and most significant verdicts and appellate reversals in California in 2021. The Daily Journal highlighted Strauss and his team’s role advising Javo Beverage Co., an industry leader in cold brew coffee extraction, in a contractual arbitration dispute against its former co-founder Stephen Corey involving theft of Javo’s intellectual property.
In addition to Strauss, the Cooley arbitration team included partners Erin Trenda and Jeffrey Karr, associates Dane Voris and Alex Miller, and others who contributed to the team’s success. The team secured an arbitration win for Javo in October 2021, when a former federal magistrate judge awarded the company $50 million in damages and made the critical finding that the patents Corey filed were based on Javo’s proprietary process for producing coffee extract and had already been assigned to Javo by operation of Corey’s confidentiality and invention assignment agreement.
In the Daily Journal article, Strauss reflected on the Cooley team’s strategy behind moving the case to arbitration and demonstrating how Corey breached his employment, confidentiality and invention assignment agreements. “As the arbitrator said … it was about credibility, and Mr. Corey’s credibility just wasn’t there,” he said. On the arbitrator’s determination that Corey’s patents belonged to Javo based on the invention assignment agreement, Strauss said, “that’s the big win.”
Strauss is a first chair trial lawyer in Cooley’s global litigation department with 40 years of experience achieving trial verdicts and settlements in excess of $10 billion. He is one of the country’s most sought after trial lawyers for complex commercial litigation, including business, intellectual property, environmental and real estate matters.
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