Non-economic damages (pain and suffering) are the most significant and variable components of liability. Our survey of 51 U.S. jurisdictions shows wide heterogeneity in whether attorneys may quantify damages as time-units of suffering (“per diem”) or demand a specific amount (“lump...

By protecting the right to a jury, the State and Federal Constitutions recognize the fundamental value of having civil and criminal disputes resolved by laypersons. However actual trials are relatively rare, in part because parties seek to avoid the risks and cost of trials, and courts seek to...

Given our adversarial system, it is not surprising that plaintiffs advance creative damages theories that would help them maximize their recoveries. In patent law, one recurring tactic is for patentees to seek remedies based on the entire infringing product instead of just the specific feature...

Modern technology products are often covered by thousands of patents. Yet awards for a single component have averaged a surprisingly high 9.98% of the infringing product’s price. To curb such disproportionate awards, the law insists that damages reflect the contribution made by the patent. But...

Perhaps, nowhere has the pace of technology placed more pressure on the law than in the area of data privacy. Huge data breaches fill our headlines. Companies often violate their own privacy policies by selling customer data, or by using the information in ways that fall outside their policy....

Technical standards are an essential part of how the modern world operates. Standards enable different devices to communicate with each other, use the same power supply and even exchange data. These standards are created by groups of companies coming together through standard settings...

In eBay, Inc. v. MercExchange, L.L.C., the Supreme Court overruled the longstanding practice of granting permanent injunctions to successful patent plaintiffs as a matter of course. When deciding whether to issue a permanent injunction, courts in patent cases now need to use the same four factor...

In 2015, Carnegie Mellon University v. Marvell Technology Group, Ltd. firmly shut the door on the worldwide causation theory holding that patentees could not recover damages based on foreign sales even if those sales were somehow caused by infringement in the United States. But just as it closed...