Freeborn & Peters issued the following announcement on Aug. 13.
Freeborn & Peters LLP is pleased to announce that it secured a significant victory on Aug. 9 for a nationally recognized retailer in a patent infringement lawsuit filed against the company in federal district court.
In the case, Judge Charles P. Kocoras of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division, granted the motion to dismiss the complaint for failure to allege a plausible infringement claim. The plaintiff, William Grecia, had accused Freeborn’s client of infringing a patent allegedly relating to a “tokenized” credit card transaction system.
The Freeborn team identified a unique strategy for turning Mr. Grecia’s own complaint allegations against him and defeated his lawsuit, on the merits, in a threshold motion. Applying a similar procedural strategy, the same team recently secured a victory in a separate patent infringement case that Mr. Grecia had filed against another nationally recognized retailer and Freeborn client. After the judge in that earlier case dismissed Mr. Grecia’s complaint, the Freeborn team sealed the victory by winning an appeal decision that the Federal Circuit handed down in March. In both cases, the court threw out Mr. Grecia’s infringement claim without requiring the parties to undertake the expense of discovery or claim construction proceedings.
“This is a major win for our client,” said Freeborn Partner Edward H. Rice, who represented the retail company in the case along with Freeborn Partner Marina N. Saito.
Ms. Saito added, “Though Mr. Grecia has asserted his patents against major credit card companies and various retailers, and has collected settlements from dozens of defendants, so far our clients are the only two that have won their cases outright, and they have done so in a threshold motion to dismiss.”
Original source can be found here.