Daniel Knauss

In August 2020, Cooley convinced a panel of judges at the PTAB to protect a key patent for CoolIT, a leader in data center cooling. A three-judge panel upheld the validity of all challenged claims while adopting arguments Cooley advanced against Petitioner’s expert and his proposed prior art combination.

Few patent cases make it all the way to the Supreme Court. Even fewer involve a dispute in which a company's very survival is at stake. Since 2011, our client Gevo, a pioneer in the biofuels industry, and Butamax, a joint venture of giants BP and DuPont, had been trading blows, filing close to a dozen patent suits against each other. Butamax initially brought suit in the District of Delaware in an attempt to knock Gevo out of the emerging market for isobutanol alternative energy. In that case, the court granted summary judgment of noninfringement in favor of Gevo, prompting Butamax to appeal. On appeal, the Federal Circuit rejected the district court's claim construction and issued a new claim construction that vacated the noninfringement ruling.

In response, Cooley took the case to the US Supreme Court and, in January 2015, the high court granted our petition for writ of certiorari, vacating the judgment against Gevo and remanding the case back to the Federal Circuit for further consideration. This decision, and numerous other victories including key summary judgment victories, paved the path for Gevo to reach a favorable global patent cross-license and settlement agreement with Butamax. The agreement forms a partnership between the two biofuel companies aimed at leveraging one another's technology.

When F. Hoffmann-La Roche sought to strip Gilead of its rights to a blockbuster drug, Gilead turned to Cooley. At stake were Gilead's exclusive rights to sofosbuvir (Sovaldi), approved by the FDA in 2013 as a breakthrough drug for the treatment of hepatitis C. Within the first six months of going to market, Sovaldi earned nearly $6 billion in sales, making it one of the most successful drug launches in history.

Roche alleged exclusive rights based on an earlier collaboration agreement. Cooley presented this "bet the company" case before a panel of three arbitrators during a two-week arbitration hearing. In August 2014, the arbitration panel issued its award, ruling in favor of Gilead and finding that Roche failed to establish any of its contract or patent-based claims to sofosbuvir. This was a huge win for Gilead, with Sovaldi generating billions of dollars in revenue each year.

The Financial Times, The American Lawyer and its sister publications The Recorder and National Law Journal all profiled the victory when announcing Cooley as the winner of multiple litigation awards, including AmLaw's recent selection of the case as "Global Dispute of the Year: Commercial Arbitration."

Palo Alto, Calif. – Cooley achieved a major victory when it secured a judgment of no infringement on behalf of leading renewable chemicals and advanced biofuels client Gevo in a patent suit brought by Butamax Advanced Biofuels, a joint venture between BP and DuPont.

On March 19, 2013, a Delaware federal judge issued a favorable claim construction ruling for Gevo, granting Gevo partial summary judgment of no infringement under the doctrine of equivalents, and ruling that two key claims of the Butamax patents were invalid. Although the Court did not grant summary judgment of no literal infringement, Butamax acknowledged that it could not prove literal infringement under the court's claim construction and agreed to stipulate to a judgment of no literal infringement.

In January 2011, Butamax filed a patent infringement suit against Gevo asserting two patents relating to the production of isobutanol, a four-carbon alcohol, in microorganisms. Gevo produces its isobutanol using proprietary recombinant yeast that is genetically engineered to produce it at a high yield. In June 2012, the court denied Butamax's request for a preliminary injunction against Gevo, a decision that was upheld by the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in December 2012. A trial date was set for early April 2013.

"This judgment marks yet another great step forward for Gevo," said Jim Brogan, partner and chair of the intellectual property group."The ruling enables this highly innovative company to continue to focus on its growth and the development of innovative biofuels products."

A separate patent re-examination team has obtained rejections of all challenged claims of the two asserted Butamax patents from the US Patent and Trademark Office.