Nic Marais

We represented GoFundMe, one of the world’s leading crowdfunding platforms, in trademark litigation in federal district court in Utah. In pursuing an aggressive defense of GoFundMe’s trademark rights, we filed an early motion for summary judgment asking the federal court to cancel and invalidate the plaintiff’s competing registered mark. Shortly after our motion for summary judgment was filed, the case reached a confidential settlement.

We defended Electronic Arts Inc. (EA) against claims that avatars in its hugely successful Madden NFL franchise used the likenesses of retired NFL players. After litigating an important First Amendment issue in the District Court and before the Ninth Circuit, we defeated two successive motions to certify a class, both because plaintiffs’ case presented intractable choice-of-law problems and because, as the court recognized, the right of publicity is inherently an individual right. In mid-2017, we prevailed at summary judgment over plaintiffs’ statutory claims: the court found that the plaintiffs had failed to demonstrate that “any of the avatars in the Madden games could be ‘readily identified’ as corresponding to any specific plaintiff based on the appearance of the avatars alone.” Not long after, the parties settled.

We served as lead counsel for Comcast in an eight-patent case brought by British Telecom in Delaware federal court. The case targeted Comcast's high speed data and telephony services and video encryption. We also asserted Comcast patents against British Telecom in Texas federal court. In Delaware, we prevailed on six of the eight patents by way of summary judgment and stipulated dismissals, and thereafter reached a very favorable resolution of both litigations.

The Securities and Exchange Commission launched a securities fraud suit in California federal court against our client, a former vice president of sales. The SEC claimed he grossly inflated his company's revenue in order to raise additional capital from investors. We also defended him in a parallel criminal investigation. We were able to prevent any criminal charges from being filed, and resolved the SEC case for a small penalty.

We represented SanDisk in a massive trade secret misappropriation and corporate espionage case. SanDisk, a global leader in flash memory storage solutions, sued competitor SK Hynix for misappropriating approximately ten gigabytes of highly confidential trade secret information and using that information over the course of six years to revamp Hynix’s technology and unfairly compete with SanDisk. We obtained a sweeping preliminary injunction that barred Hynix from any further use or disclosure of stolen SanDisk information, and fought back efforts to dismiss the case, to send it to arbitration, to transfer it overseas, and to remove it from the court that granted the preliminary injunction. Following a series of courtroom victories for our client, the parties reached a confidential settlement and entered into a product supply agreement.