Jodi A. Schwendimann, et al., v. Arkwright Advanced Coating, Inc. (Federal Circuit Opinion, May 5, 2020)

As regular readers know, we are perplexed by excessive statutory prejudgment rates applied to patent infringement awards. Those rates are historically sourced in a world financially & temporally removed from ours, which presently finds itself staring down negative rates. Antiquated statutory rates are increasingly unreasonable and afford plaintiffs windfall gains. The case below affords another such example.

Defendant Arkwright appealed this matter to the Federal Circuit based, in part, on the jury’s damages award, as well as on the prejudgment interest awarded by Judge Tunheim of the US District Court for the State of Minnesota. We do not address all of the damages-related decisions, but focus here on the determination that 10% per year was the appropriate prejudgment interest rate to apply to the jury’s award.

Here is the story: Initially, plaintiffs sought lost profits damages. Plaintiffs’ damages expert, Donald Gorowsky, provided an opinion relying only on lost profits – he did not provide any reasonable royalty alternative. In pre-trial motions, defense counsel sought to strike Mr. Gorowsky’s opinions, but Judge Tunheim chose to allow Mr. Gorowsky to testify. After plaintiffs presented their affirmative case at trial, however, Judge Tunheim granted defendant’s judgment as a matter of law on lost profits and instructed the jury to disregard the lost profits testimony of Mr. Gorowsky.

The jury then heard testimony from defendant’s expert, Arthur Cobb, who opined to a reasonable royalty of 2%. The jury ultimately returned a damages award of $2.6 million – a figure roughly seven times Mr. Cobb’s proffered damages amount. In his post-trial opinion, Judge Tunheim explained that the jury’s award of $2.6 million amounted to a 15.5% royalty rate on infringing sales from 2010 to 2017, when one averaged competing estimates for accused products at issue.

The court rejected a new trial on damages explaining that defendant’s gross margin supported the double-digit reasonable royalty.

Next, the court awarded prejudgment interest of $1.9 million on the $2.6 million award. This amount was derived using Minnesota’s statutory rate of 10% per annum. As the supporting Exhibit below shows, the 10% statutory rate was applied on the entire $2.6 million award from the date of first infringement through the date of judgment.

The prejudgment interest calculation does not afford consideration that the 15.5% reasonable royalty presumably would have been earned incrementally over the course of the infringement period as individual accused products were sold… and that as of the date of first infringement, only a small portion of total infringement had occurred. Instead, the prejudgment interest approach conceptually presupposes a fully paid-up, lump-sum royalty on the eve of infringement. Defense counsel made these arguments:

Importantly, nowhere in Judge Tunheim’s opinion do we find reference to the 15.5% rate as a “running” royalty; rather, it is described in the excerpt above as “a clean royalty rate.” And the only reference to “lump sum” is excerpted below, which quotes the passage above:

Accordingly, the court accepted Mr. Gorowsky’s PJI calculation.

All of these issues were appealed by defense counsel. In turn, the Federal Circuit ultimately affirmed Judge Tunheim’s judgment, as explained below:

We understand the charge of the trier of fact is to “make the patent owner whole”. Double-digit statutory rates increasingly afford windfall gains in a zero-rate environment by providing far more than the amount adequate to compensate for infringement. In this case, over 42% of the award was an interest payment (i.e., $1,915,328/$4,539,556 = 42.19%). Attorneys representing plaintiffs with a lump-sum royalty prospect stretching back years & years should consider the PJI windfalls evidently on offer from the US District Court for the State of Minnesota.

J.C. Penny v. Financial Reality (May 15, 2020)

Back in June 2018, we observed that J.C. Penny bonds were fetching an 11.9% yield… as a way to ~~heap economic derision~~ encourage reflection on 12% statutory prejudgment interest rates.

J.C. Penny filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy this past Friday.

While J.C. Penny may have had to face financial reality, double-digit statutory rates continue to impose their measure of financial disreality.

Hologic, Inc., Cytyc Surgical Products, LLC v. Minerva Surgical, Inc. (Federal Circuit Opinion, April 22, 2020)

The Federal Circuit issued an opinion regarding apportionment, supplemental damages, post-verdict royalty rate, and enhanced damages. Delaware Federal Circuit Judge Bataillon’s decisions regarding all of these damages issues were affirmed by the Federal Circuit.

The most interesting of the Federal Circuit’s affirmations concerns apportionment. The initial suit accused defendant Minerva of infringing claims of the ‘183 patent and ‘348 patent. Subsequent to the complaint, the PTO determined that the claims (including all asserted claims) of the ‘183 method patent were obvious & invalid. By the time of trial, only the ‘348 patent remained asserted; however, the patent damages experts did not apportion damages between the two patents. Post verdict, Minerva moved for judgment that the jury was not instructed to apportion damages on a per patent basis.

Judge Bataillon and the Federal Circuit agreed that given the overlapping nature of the two asserted patents, as well as the fact that the patent claims found invalid were those of the method patent, the jury’s damages award should stand. The Federal Circuit distinguished this opinion from other opinions about per-patent damages as follows:

This provides an interesting exception to the rule that damages must be apportioned on a patent-specific basis.

Juno Therapeutics, Inc., et al. v. Kite Pharma, Inc. (Final Judgment, April 8, 2020)

There is a good bit we do not know about this case at the moment. Many documents, including Daubert motions and motions to strike, remain under seal. Given the enormity of the damages granted by a jury (i.e., $778 million), we expect this is the first post of what will be several more to come. We do know, however, that Judge Gutierrez in the Central District of California, issued his final judgment which allowed for prejudgment interest at the treasury rate compounded quarterly. We applaud his use of this reference rate.

Judge Gutierrez’s prejudgment interest determination should be compared to CDCA Judge Selna’s decision that prejudgment interest in the SPEX Technologies matter should be seven percent.

Judge Selna did not opine about compounding. We remain perplexed as to why prejudgment interest should afford windfall gains for some, while affording others a simple adjustment for the real time-value of money.

What do we mean?

Consider the chart below from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (a.k.a., “FRED”). It reports the option-adjusted spread for a high yield debt index for the October 2010 to February 2020 time period specified by Judge Selna. What does this mean in more common parlance (a.k.a., “English”)?

This graph reports a measure of how much additional yield (a.k.a., “spread”) investors demanded/received to hold high-yield bonds (a.k.a., “junk bonds”) relative to holding instead U.S. Treasuries (a.k.a., “risk free rate”) of comparable maturity. The “option-adjusted” component involves backing out from the price of BB-rated bonds in the index any embedded options: this is necessary to establish an “apples-to-apples” comparison for yield alone (because the reference Treasuries do not possess similar embedded options).

What this graph shows is that during the period of time subject to Judge Selna’s 7% statutory rate, the spread on junk bonds remained well below 7%. At no point during the period did that high yield spread achieve 7%. In fact, one of the hallmarks of the period following the Great Financial Crisis was “the hunt for yield“: investors were hard pressed to find much of it. Anywhere. Even in speculative, non-investment grade corporate bonds… where the graph above shows one could only earn between a 2.0% and 6.0% spread.

Where on earth was a 7% yield available during this period? We have no idea, but one place we believe it should not be found is in a prejudgment rate.

But wait – there’s more!

The chart below shows the same OAS High Yield spread from FRED for January 1, 2020 until today. It shows that investors were finally afforded more than a 7% spread by the high yield index… for a brief, one-week period between March 19 and March 26. Gosh… what might have been going on during that week to afford high yield a 7% spread?

Oh yeah… the end of the freaking world.

(N.b., In the bottom left-hand area of its charts, FRED notes “Shaded areas indicate U.S. recessions”; however, FRED has not shaded any area. With 22 million Americans registering for unemployment in the past four weeks, we expect the official arbiter of recessions to report the U.S. economy slipped into recession in March. While FRED shades with grey, if you are like us, and well, half of humanity… hunkered down sheltering in place somewhere… waiting…. then red is the more apt tone for our present circumstance.)

Eko Brands, LLC, v. Adrian Riviera Maynez Enterprises, Inc. et al. (Order Awarding Prejudgment Interest, June 14, 2018)

Let’s briefly discuss bonds… so that we can then discuss sovereign debt issued by Argentina*, so that we can turn our ultimate attention to the Western District of Washington.

In exchange for immediate access to cash, a bond-issuer typically promises to return that cash amount at some future specified date, and agrees to provide some additional stream of cash to compensate the lender for the loan.

The date when the borrowed cash is returned is called the bond’s “maturity.”

The stream of cash that forms compensation informs a bond’s “yield.”

For example, if I lend an old college roommate $100 for 10 years, and the ex-roommate agrees to pay me $6 each year on the anniversary of our agreement, the bond is said to have a 10-year maturity and is said to “yield 6%” (i.e., $6/$100 = 6%).

Bonds can be bought & sold on the open market. Using our prior example, let’s say that upon making my $100 loan for 10 years, I immediately turn around and sell the obligation to you for $105. Now, you have paid $105 for the annual $6 anniversary payment from my ex-roommate, and you can be understood to have purchased a bond yielding $6/$105 = 5.7142857%.

This example demonstrates the seesaw relationship between bond prices & yield, and the oft-encountered maxim, “Rising bond prices = lower yields.”

(The counter is also true: “Falling bond prices = higher yields.”)

Presumably, those who would lend money to a borrower will take care to demand a rate of interest/return commensurate with the associated risk. To continue with our example, if I lent my ex-roommate $100 at 6% 20 years ago when we were college roommates, and said-roommate never paid me back, when said-roommate comes to me again looking for another $100 loan, I will reasonably include prior experience with failure-to-pay in assessment of risk of any further loan.

Perhaps now I will insist on $15 per year, for an effective yield of 15%.

This is the relationship between assessed risk and rate of interest/return/yield: the higher the former, so commensurately high should be the latter.

Countries also issue (sovereign) debt. For example, the U.S. Treasury as of June 28, 2018 has issued $21,149,679,487,479.03… or “just over” $21 trillion (to the extent that $149 billion is worthy of rounding…).

Other countries issue debt, too: for example, Argentina!

Argentina is an interesting case, because successive governments there have issued debt, but then failed periodically to pay it back (like our college roommate example above). The history is complicated, and we will not belabor you with details beyond observing that Argentina has defaulted on its external debt (and its internal debt) multiple times throughout its 200 year history, including in 2001, when it defaulted on +$100 billion in what was then the largest sovereign default in history.

Which made it all the more surprising 1 year ago when Argentina successfully issued $2.75 billion in bonds with a maturity of 100 years (a.k.a., “century bonds”). Which is to say that if you participated in that issuance, you were extremely unlikely ever personally to receive back upon maturity the sum of money you originally lent. Because you’ll likely have been dead for decades – so sorry – when the debt matures.

What was the yield demanded by lenders of this 100-year bond issuance from a party that has demonstrated periodic incapacity/unwillingness to make good on its debt obligations? About 7.9%. So, while you are not likely to be around when the debt comes due, at least as a participant you enjoy the promise of a stream of payments worth 7.9%, and that ain’t nothin’.

But alas now (exactly one year later today!), Argentina’s economy is in trouble… again.

And the prospects of timely payment are being drawn into question… again.

And the price of those 100 year bonds is falling in the open market, because investors familiar with the country’s credit history observe its immediate prospects.

And as the price for those bonds falls in the open market, the seesaw of their effective yield is on the rise… approaching 10%.

If you are comfortable with the certainty that Argentina, despite its history of relatively recent (and spectacularly large) default, will pay you back in (now) 99 years, you can enjoy a yield of over 9%!

And that might seem attractive, perhaps especially so in a low-rate world where the 30-year Treasury bond from Uncle Sam yields a paltry ~3.0%.

But you need to ask yourself, “Is the yield commensurate with the risk?”

Which brings A2C back to its park bench with the pigeons….

A recent order from the Western District of Washington caught our attention. Why?

Because….

“12 percent?!”

Let’s quickly verify the math…

12% Annual Rate X $66,087.76 = $7,930.53 for an entire year.

132 days/365 days = ~36.1643836% of the year.

$7,930.53 X 36.161643836% = $2,868.027 = $2,868.03.

$2,868.03 + $66,087.76 = $68,955.79.

The math is impeccable! Kudos!

Here’s the thing….

In a world where the effective yield on a serial sovereign defaulter’s 99-year bond remains under 10%, we are hard-pressed to defend on an economic or financial basis 12% statutory rates for prejudgment interest.

* Had Argentina failed to advance to the Round of 16 at the World Cup, A2C would not have piled on needlessly. Instead, we could have used the corporate bonds from some struggling retail chains, such as 99 Cents Store yielding ~11.8% (CUSIP: 65440KAB2), or JC Penny yielding ~11.9% (CUSIP: 708130AC3). Some small distressed energy concerns also have corporate bonds out there with effective yields approaching 12%.

Howmedica Osteonics Corp., v. Zimmer, Inc., Centerpulse Orthopedics, Inc. (Opinion May 23, 2018)

If you set aside a park bench for all those people on planet Earth who are utterly fascinated by the topic of prejudgment interest, the authors of A2C – together & alone – would share a quiet lunch, discussing PJI while tossing crumbs to the pigeons.

In that spirit, we report that Senior District Judge Walls from the District of New Jersey recently offered an opinion granting attorneys’ fees & costs, but no prejudgment interest, in a case of alleged infringement brought way back in 2005. In support of the decision, Judge Walls observes:

Judge Walls notes that the attorneys’ fees were reasonable except for those “hours billed due to inexperience, hours billed for tasks that should have been performed by more cost-effective actors, and hours and tasks that took an excessive amount of time to complete.” Included in the opinion, but not replicated here, are details regarding hourly billing.*

As for prejudgment interest, however, Judge Walls provided the following justification for not granting the request:

We sit on our bench feeding pigeons, while struggling mightily to understand the economic logic of this decision. Specifically, Judge Walls finds that there was deceit by the plaintiff over the course of a decade; and that attorneys’ fees are correspondingly justified… but there is no basis for affording the defendant the benefit of any compensation related to the time-value of its money?

Within the confines of the courtroom, this may make sense.

From the purview of our park bench, it is incoherent to us (and the pigeons).

From the opinion, it appears that prejudgment interest is just one in the line of many additional ways to exact money. What appears to have been lost is that if the money was rightfully remitted by the losing party, then the time value of that money should also be considered. If Judge Walls is operating with some conceptual economic cap to compensation (and below we provide evidence to suggest the possibility of such conceptual caps), the attorneys’ fees should arguably have been reduced, and then been adjusted for the time value of money to arrive at roughly the same monetary compensation.

* An interesting side-item from Judge Walls: despite what we would have assumed to be a relatively efficient market for legal services, an economic cap evidently exists on the professional value available from attorneys of $900/hour.

Columbia Sportswear North America, Inc. v. Seirus Innovative Accessories, Inc. (Opinion April 17, 2018)

In yet another case, a judge has ruled that an appropriate prejudgment interest rate is the California statutory rate of 7%.

The case in question involved a design patent and an apparatus patent. A jury found the apparatus patent invalid; however, it found the design patent infringed, and those claims not invalid. As a result, the jury awarded the infringer’s profits to the plaintiff, Columbia Sportswear.

After trial and after judgment was rendered, Columbia Sportswear requested the California 7% statutory rate as prejudgment interest, as well as supplemental lost profits. Judge Marco Hernandez from the Southern District of California awarded both, despite defendant Seirus’ arguments that awarding seven percent interest on top of profits would deprive it of more than it originally earned. The justification for the amount was as follows:

“Prejudgment interest removes the incentive to live off of the profits until caught.” This elegant formulation enjoys enormous economic and judicial leverage.

There is, however, a flip-side….

Court’s recourse to a 7% statutory rate set decades ago divorces compensation from the facts of a case, relies on a rate detached from current financial and economic reality, and we would argue is inappropriate for most awards.

Lawrence E. Tannas v. Multichip Display, Inc., et al. (Decided February 21, 2018)

Judge Guilford of the Central District of California issued an opinion regarding damages, fees and prejudgment interest in this patent infringement case.

Neither plaintiff nor defendants used damages experts, and the court decided that, “Plaintiff essentially relies on attorney argument with minimal analysis” which renders its proffered damages award unsupported. The court specifically notes that even if attorneys want to argue that an established royalty rate exists, they must provide sufficient proof for that rate. In this case, the court held that the plaintiff failed to do that.

A second opinion, regarding legal fees, quotes both former Justice O’Connor and current Justice Kagan when concluding that the fixed sum of $250,000 is reasonable considering “what is happening in the legal profession as hourly billing has become increasingly unpopular and clients prefer to look at aggregate, global numbers”:

Finally, the plaintiff requested statutory prejudgment interest of 7%, compounded quarterly. After finding apparent fault with plaintiff’s lack of basis for its preferred quarterly-compounded 7% rate, the court instead decided that 5% without compounding was the appropriate rate.

Trustees Of Boston University v. Everlight Electronics Co. (CAFC oral argument 12/8/17)

This case was originally filed in 2012 in Massachusetts. The case went to trial and BU won on infringement and validity, with the jury awarding damages in the form of a fully paid-up lump sum. On the jury verdict form, the jury chose a one-time payment for the life of the patent, as opposed to a running royalty rate based on sales.

The interesting question for damages came in post-judgment motions, when BU asked for prejudgment interest. BU argued such interest should accrue from the date of the hypothetical negotiation (i.e., January 2000), rather than from the point in time six to twelve years (for the three defendants) later, when notice occurred and damages began to accrue.

In her opinion, Judge Saris explained that since damages could not accrue until after the hypothetical negotiation, prejudgment interest could also not accrue until notice occurred. Her conclusion was based largely upon BU’s lack of supporting case law:

On December 8, 2017, the CAFC heard oral arguments on the issue (N.b., the relevant argument begins at 29 minutes & 30 seconds into the recording available below). The prejudgment interest case discussed was Gen. Motors Corp. v. Devex Corp., 461 U.S. 648, 655 (1983). Counsel for BU argued that the case supports the notion that lump-sum damages awarded by a jury should accrue interest from the hypothetical negotiation. It will be interesting to read the Court’s eventual opinion on this specific issue.