St. Louis patent litigator Doug Robinson appears in a new Law360 article that discusses several patent hearings in which judges used unorthodox methods to streamline the proceedings.

The article highlights Robinson’s quote on Comcast Cable Communications, LLC v. OpenTV, Inc. from August 2017. The case is notable for invoking the phrase “patent shootout,” which U.S. District Judge William Alsup in the Northern District of California used to describe the proceeding in which OpenTV chose its best example of patent infringement and Comcast chose its best example of an erroneous infringement claim.

The idea was to gauge the strength of each party’s claims by pitting their best arguments against each other rather than battling out each individual argument. In the end, Comcast prevailed.

Robinson suggested that some courts may adopt similar strategies, “but I don’t necessarily think it’s going to be something where there’s going to be a wave of courts immediately adopting this sort of procedure,” he said at the time. “A lot of these courts see a lot of these cases and are very experienced and comfortable with their own procedures.”

His prediction turned out to be correct: courtrooms have been safe from “patent shootouts” since then.

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