Kirkland & Ellis LLP Achieves Favorable Jury Result for Fleming Post-Confirmation Trust

The Los Angeles office of Kirkland & Ellis LLP secured a positive result for the Fleming Post-Confirmation Trust in federal district court in Hawaii.

The jury verdict came in on March 7, 2006, in Honolulu, Judge Susan Oki Mollway presiding. The case involved allegations of copyright infringement by the Hawaii division of Fleming for allegedly making unauthorized changes and using a freight control software system developed by the plaintiff Wayne Berry. While the Court determined that there was direct infringement, it also determined that the infringement was inadvertent.

The Kirkland team, led by former partner Eric Liebeler and current partners Michael Baumann and Damian Capozzola, along with associate Olivia Samad and former associate Melissa Dulac, had previously succeeded in narrowing the period of alleged infringement by winning summary judgment on the issue of whether a replacement system was a derivative of the copyrighted freight control system. Plaintiff nonetheless claimed that without the freight control system itself, movement of goods from the mainland to Hawaii would have been much more expensive, that Fleming profited from use of the system, and that plaintiff was actually damaged because of his inability to license the system and work on the system.

At trial, the plaintiff asked the jury for in excess of $50 million in total damages, but the jury awarded only $57,534.

Kirkland & Ellis LLP is a 1,100-attorney law firm representing global clients in complex litigation, dispute resolution and arbitration, corporate, restructuring, tax and intellectual property and technology matters. The Firm has offices in Los Angeles, Chicago, London, Munich, New York, San Francisco and Washington, D.C.