Sean is a trial lawyer with extensive experience in litigating patents, trade secrets, and other intellectual property in “bet the company” cases on behalf of both plaintiffs and defendants. Sean was co-lead counsel for Qualcomm in its global dispute against Apple. A Southern California jury verdict awarded a royalty of $1.41/unit on Apple’s infringing products, and two separate ITC Investigations resulted in findings of infringement. The second ITC case resulted in an impending exclusion order that would affect all of the newest and future iPhones after Apple’s extensive public interest arguments based on 5G and competition were soundly rejected by the ALJ. These results helped drive the successful settlement of the parties’ global dispute before any of Apple’s offensive claims were ever heard by a jury, resulting in billions of dollars of chip sales and licensing revenues for Qualcomm. Sean was one of two lead counsel for plaintiff Viasat in a complex patent and contract breach case against Space Systems/Loral involving broadband satellites, which resulted in a jury verdict of $283 million for Viasat in the Southern District of California. Sean also obtained a complete defense verdict as trial counsel in a multi-patent jury trial in Delaware on behalf of Symantec, defeating a claim for damages exceeding $1 billion.
Sean was also trial counsel on behalf of defendant Samsung Electronics in the second “smartphone” patent trial brought by Apple in the Northern District of California. All Apple patents defended by Sean and his team were found to be not infringed. Apple received less than six percent of its damages claim on the remaining patents defended by the Firm. Sean also serves as a Director on the Board of Viasat, a publicly traded American communications company and provider of high-speed satellite broadband services and secure networking systems covering military and commercial markets. Sean received his J.D., cum laude, from Harvard Law School, and B.S. and M.Eng. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT, and has engineering experience at Intel and the MIT AI Laboratory.