Litigation Departments of the Year, IP—Winner: Kirkland & Ellis

Kirkland & Ellis was named “Litigation Department of the Year, Intellectual Property” as part of the National Law Journal Legal Awards. Sean McEldowney participated in this Q&A. 

Describe your firm’s approach to litigation and your strategy for building successful teams for trials or other matters.

Our mindset is always, “How do we develop a record that will yield pretrial victories and a story that will yield a trial victory?” Part of the answer is a team with the right mix of litigation and life experience.

Discuss the two biggest litigation cases your firm worked on in 2024 and how you reached successful outcomes.

We won an "unclean hands" defense for Samsung in patent litigation involving our client's Bixby AI feature and mobile phone technology. Through two years of intensive discovery and pretrial work, our team was able to uncover egregious misconduct. We also represented Lenovo and Motorola Mobility in the most high-profile and hard-fought standard essential patent licensing dispute in recent years. This massive case involved attorneys on both sides of the Atlantic, culminating in a favorable global settlement of litigation that spanned U.K. courts, U.S. district courts, the U.S. ITC, Federal Circuit and more.

What are the most challenging and satisfying aspects of your work in litigation?

We like cases that present bet-the-company technology, even those that appear unwinnable. It is very gratifying in those cases to develop creative factual and legal theories in discovery, and then see those theories through summary judgment or at trial.

What is the most important piece of advice you’d share with young lawyers?

Jump at every opportunity to watch and do. There’s an endless amount to learn in this profession, and you learn it by watching it and then doing it.