Law360 recognized Shareholder Eric Buresh among its 2022 “MVPs of the Year,” a designation for “attorneys who have distinguished themselves from their peers over the past year through high-stakes litigation, record-breaking deals, and complex global matters.”
More than 900 lawyers were nominated; Buresh was one of just five in the entire country to be named an “MVP” in intellectual property.
The publication cited Buresh’s “numerous victories over the past year,” including defense verdicts for Sony and NetScout for trials in the notoriously difficult Eastern District of Texas.
These two trials are the latest in a string of victories for Buresh in the Eastern District of Texas, where he is now four-for-four with defense verdicts since 2019.
Following is an excerpt of Buresh’s profile in Law360; the full article is available here.
Buresh was part of the legal team representing Sony Interactive Entertainment LLC in a lawsuit alleging that its PlayStation console and Spider-Man and Gears of War video games infringed developers Infernal Technology LLC and Terminal Reality Inc.’s patented light rendering technology.
A Texas federal jury had determined that the PlayStation console and games did not infringe the patents, also finding that the patents cover technology that is “well-understood, routine and conventional,” the first step in proving that the patents are invalid under the U.S. Supreme Court’s Alice ruling.
In January, the game developers filed a motion for a new trial, but the district judge refused the request in March, holding that the developers’ attempt to “un-do” the verdict fell flat because it contested the jury’s interpretation of a term that they’d previously agreed to.
Buresh also helped NetScout Systems in Longhorn HD’s lawsuit alleging that NetScout’s software products infringed a patent covering a cybersecurity tool. The case was the first of numerous patent infringement suits that Longhorn, a patent-holding company, brought against various tech companies. In April, a jury sided with NetScout and found that it did not infringe the patent.
“I think just having them very close to back-to-back was a really big accomplishment, and the two defense verdicts were pretty big for us,” Buresh said.