Alison Frankel

By Alison Frankel and Dan Levine

Samsung doesn’t want you to know why it believes juror misconduct tainted the $1.05 billion verdict that a San Jose federal court jury delivered to Apple in August. Its lawyers at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan redacted that entire section of the motion for judgment as a matter of law that they filed Friday with U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, California. But from a close examination of the statute and cases Samsung cited in the redacted section, we’ve discerned Samsung’s two-pronged argument for juror misconduct: The nine-person jury improperly considered extraneous evidence during deliberations and jury foreman Velvin Hogan failed to disclose in voir dire that he was involved in 1993 litigation with a former employer that led him and his wife to declare personal bankruptcy.

In an exclusive interview Tuesday about Samsung’s secret new allegations, Hogan, an engineer, confirmed that he was a party in two cases cited in Samsung’s brief, a 1993 case from municipal court in Santa Cruz titled Seagate Technology v. Hogan and a 1993 federal bankruptcy case titled In re Velvin R. Hogan. According to Hogan, when Seagate hired him in the 1980s and he moved from Colorado to California, his new employer agreed to split the cost of paying off the mortgage on his Colorado home. But after Hogan was laid off in the early 1990s, he told us, Seagate claimed he owed the company that money. Hogan said he sued Seagate for fraud, Seagate countersued, and he ultimately declared personal bankruptcy to protect his house.

Can Quinn Emanuel credibly argue that Koh needs to hold a hearing to determine whether Hogan’s failure to disclose the 1993 litigation is grounds to throw out an unrelated patent infringement verdict for Apple? Again, we don’t know precisely what Samsung’s argument is, but several of the cases it cited in the new brief’s table of authorities concern juror bias and the failure to disclose relevant information in the jury selection process. In U.S. v. Perkins, for instance, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 1984 that the defendant in a criminal obstruction of justice case was entitled to a new trial because a juror didn’t reveal that he had previously been both a defendant in a civil case over stolen union funds and a witness in a criminal case involving the firebombing of a union hall. In a 1989 2nd Circuit ruling called U.S. v. Colombo, the court called for an evidentiary hearing on whether a juror deliberately failed to disclose that her brother-in-law was a government prosecutor in order to get on the jury, and held that if she hid her ties to the government, convictions in a huge Mafia racketeering case must be vacated.

The new Samsung brief also cited two relevant 9th Circuit cases, one criminal and one civil. In 1989, in Hard v. Burlington Northern, the appeals court ruled that the district court must hold an evidentiary hearing to find out whether a juror lied in voir dire to cover up his former employment with the railroad and then tainted deliberations by telling other jurors about the railroad’s workers’ compensation policies. And a divided en banc court emphasized the importance of probing for juror bias in the 1998 case Dyer v. Calderon, in which the appeals court said a state judge hadn’t adequately checked the story of a juror in a double homicide case who said her brother had been shot accidentally when, in fact, his killer had been prosecuted. “A court confronted with a colorable claim of juror bias must undertake an investigation of the relevant facts and circumstances,” the 9th Circuit held.

Samsung appears to be arguing that Hogan’s previous litigation with Seagate may have biased him. The cases it cited suggest that, at the very least, the company wants Koh to hold an evidentiary hearing on Hogan’s failure to reveal the 1993 litigation in voir dire.

The standard for U.S. judges to grant a preliminary injunction is notoriously high. Plaintiffs have to show that they’re likely to succeed on the merits; that they’ll suffer irreparable harm if the injunction isn’t granted; that the injunction is in the public interest; and that the balance of fairness supports awarding the bar. In patent cases, the analysis of likely success on the merits offers two outs for defendants: they can show that the plaintiffs’ patent probably isn’t valid or that they didn’t infringe it. In other words, there’s a long list of reasons for a judge to refuse to grant a preliminary injunction (which is one reason why so many patent holders also seek injunctions overseas).

In the most consequential injunction case of the moment — Apple’s attempt to bar sales of three Samsung smartphones and Samsung’s new Galaxy tablet — U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh of San Jose federal court picked reasons from all over the no-injunction menu as she refused late Friday to grant the injunction. (Here’s the Reuters story from Dan Levine.) There’s no real theme running through Koh’s decision, which analyzes each asserted patent and each allegedly infringing product. That’s frustrating for anyone hoping to find a broader meaning for smartphone litigation in her ruling, but it gives Apple and Samsung a pretty clear indication of how they’re likely to fare as the merits case moves forward.

Apple asserted that two Samsung phones — the Galaxy 4G and Infuse 4G — infringe two Apple design patents. Based on the precedent established by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in a case called Egyptian Goddess v. Swisa, Koh applied an “ordinary observer” test to evaluate infringement. She concluded that although it is “a close question,” an ordinary observer would likely find Samsung’s Galaxy and Infuse phones infringe Apple’s patent on a flat, black, rectangular smartphone with a translucent face. She found that under the Durling v. Spectrum Furniture test for obviousness, Samsung was likely to succeed in challenging one of Apple’s smartphone design patents as invalid — but she found Samsung had not raised substantial questions about the validity of the other patent.

As all the world knows, Samsung is engaged in a do-or-die international patent battle with Apple. On Wednesday alone, Samsung saw a court in the Netherlands enjoin it from infringing an Apple smartphone patent; planned for an injunction hearing in Germany, where a court enjoined the Samsung Galaxy Tab, then lifted the preliminary injunction; and went before Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose federal court, where Apple is demanding yet another injunction barring Samsung devices.

But all that bet-the-company stuff doesn’t mean there’s no place for fun. In an August 23 declaration that set the tech world snickering, Samsung’s lawyers at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan asserted that Apple’s extremely broad design patents on the iPad were anticipated by (among other pop culture reference points) Stanley Kubrick’s 1969 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Quinn even helpfully provided a link to a YouTube clip of the crew of the Kubrick spaceship Discovery using thin rectangular devices that look curiously like iPads. (A similar Star Trek clip suggests Captain Picard also used an iPad before Apple invented it.)

The argument isn’t quite as wacky as you might think. Just recently, lawyers for Yves Saint Laurent told Manhattan federal judge Victor Marrero that Christian Louboutin can’t trademark red soles because Dorothy had red shoes in The Wizard of Oz; Judge Marrero cited Dorothy’s “famous ruby slippers” on the first page of his opinion knocking out Louboutin’s trademark. Trademarks have squishier standards than patents, but if it worked for Yves, maybe it’ll work for Samsung as well.