A recent NLJ story by Scott Graham, “No Right to Jury Trial on Patent Fee Shifting, Federal Circuit Rules,” reports that there is no Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial on the issue of attorney fee awards in patent cases.  Not even when $12 million is at stake.  So ruled the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in a notorious pair of cases involving the rights to a scientific breakthrough on Alzheimer's disease research.

The Alzheimer's Institute of America, also known as AIA, argued that the jury that heard its patent validity case should also have decided whether it acted in bad faith.  Instead, U.S. District Judge Timothy Savage of Philadelphia made that finding and socked AIA with a $3.9 million fee award.  U.S. Magistrate Judge Elizabeth Laporte in the Northern District of California followed with a $7.8 million award predicated on Savage's findings.

The Federal Circuit affirmed the fee awards.  “The Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial does not apply to requests for attorney’s fees under Section 285 of the Patent Act,” Judge Todd Hughes wrote in AIA America v. Avid Radiopharmaceuticals.  Savage “did not err by making factual findings not foreclosed by the jury’s verdict.”

The two cases are among many the institute brought against university and pharmaceutical researchers over the last decade.  Some companies settled for millions of dollars, while others fought back.  Avid argued that AIA never owned the patent on a genetic defect known as the Swedish mutation that’s associated with Alzheimer’s disease.  A Philadelphia federal jury agreed that AIA did not have standing to assert the patent.

Savage then ruled that “the evidence at trial amply showed” that AIA's principal, businessman Ronald Sexton, conspired with two scientists to hide their blockbuster Alzheimer’s discovery from their university employers.  At oral arguments in June, Buckley told the Federal Circuit that Sexton had been acting on advice of counsel and that Savage's finding of bad faith could not be squared with the trial evidence.

Hughes wrote that Federal Circuit case law does forbid trial judges from making findings that are inconsistent with issues “necessarily and actually decided by the jury.”  But that wasn't the situation here.  “These decisions do not prevent a court, when deciding equitable issues, from making additional findings not precluded by the jury’s verdict,” Hughes wrote.