A team of Greenberg Traurig, LLP attorneys secured a complete victory for Chewy Inc. in a patent infringement battle with International Business Machines Corp., which claimed the online pet supply retailer's website and mobile app violated several IBM patents.
NEW YORK, April 14, 2022 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- A team of Greenberg Traurig, LLP attorneys secured a complete victory for Chewy Inc. in a patent infringement battle with International Business Machines Corp., which claimed the online pet supply retailer's website and mobile app violated several IBM patents.
In a summary judgment order issued Tuesday, U.S. District Court Judge Jed S. Rakoff ruled that Chewy didn't infringe three out of four IBM patents and that a fourth patent was invalid as it was directed to an abstract idea (a fifth patent was dismissed earlier in the case after the court ruled it invalid). The judge dismissed IBM's counterclaims with prejudice.
The case began in February 2021, when Chewy – after rejecting an IBM license offer – filed a complaint for declaratory judgment of non-infringement of four IBM patents (U.S. Patent Nos. 7,072,849, 9,569,414, 7,076,443 and 6,704,034). In response, IBM filed counterclaims alleging infringement of these four patents, and then later added another patent to the case (U.S. Patent No. 7,496,831). IBM claimed these patents covered various website and mobile app functions such as allowing a user to hover over a product to see a magnified image, caching advertisements locally and reorganizing hyperlinks on a browser display when the width size is adjusted.
"We are very happy with the court's decision, which affirms what we knew from the start. We demonstrated to IBM from the outset that Chewy did not infringe any of its patents – and that the patents were invalid," said New York Shareholder Joshua L. Raskin, vice chair of Greenberg Traurig's Patent Litigation Group and chair of the New York Intellectual Property & Technology Group and head of the team representing Chewy.
Chewy's first win in the case came last year after Judge Rakoff held a claim construction hearing to define the key terms of the asserted patents. In the order that followed, Judge Rakoff invalidated one patent and defined the key terms in the four remaining patents in a manner that was almost universally favorable for Chewy.
After the ruling in the claim construction hearing was issued, IBM altered its infringement theories. Following an intricate discovery process involving the examination of thousands of documents between Chewy and IBM, as well as taking and defending over a dozen depositions, Chewy moved for summary judgment on the remaining four patents on various non-infringement and invalidity grounds, which motion was granted in its entirety.
The Greenberg Traurig team also included Shareholders Allan A. Kassenoff and Julie P. Bookbinder, Of Counsel Vimal Kapadia, and Associates Cort Welch, Jade Li-Yu Chen, and Jonathan Presvelis, and Law Clerk Danielle Zapata, all based in New York, as well as Chicago Associate Maja E. Sherman.
Case number: 21-cv-1319 (JSR)
Court of record: U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
About Greenberg Traurig: Greenberg Traurig, LLP has more than 2400 attorneys in 42 locations in the United States, Europe, Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East. The firm, often recognized for its focus on philanthropic giving, innovation, diversity and pro bono, reported gross revenue of over $2 Billion for FY 2021. The firm is consistently among the top firms on the Am Law 100, Am Law Global 100, NLJ 250, and Law360 (US) 400. On the debut 2022 Law360 Pulse Leaderboard, it is a Top 15 firm. Greenberg Traurig is Mansfield Rule 4.0 Certified Plus by The Diversity Lab and net carbon neutral with respect to its office energy usage. Web: http://www.gtlaw.com.
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SOURCE Greenberg Traurig, LLP
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