Bloomberg Law Features Abby Parsons in Texas Q&A

Abby Parsons, a Houston-based partner in Arnold & Porter’s Intellectual Property practice, was featured in a recent Bloomberg Law “Texas Brief” newsletter, discussing why damages awards in intellectual property cases have grown so much larger in recent years.

Abby explained that federal juries have become far more receptive to big-dollar verdicts than they were even a few years ago, giving plaintiffs’ lawyers room to ask for sums that once would have seemed out of reach.

“As a plaintiff lawyer, you can get much more aggressive in your request to juries, more so than you could before,” she said. “Whereas before I couldn’t stand up in front of a jury and ask with a straight face for a billion dollars, I can absolutely do that now. And the juries, they don’t bat an eye.”

That same willingness to award large sums has changed how defense teams build their cases, Abby said. Because appellate courts have reversed many of these outsized verdicts, defense lawyers now spend much of the trial closely scrutinizing how the other side calculated its damages number, rather than waiting until after the verdict to challenge it.

“As a defendant, you’re picking apart damages models all through the trial case, because the federal circuit and other appellate courts are being the backstops and flipping a lot of these big verdicts,” she said.

Abby also noted several other trends, including the impact of artificial intelligence on patent law and the growth of the Texas legal market.

Read the full Q&A (subscription required).