A jury found Toshiba liable of breach of fiduciary duty and theft of trade secrets after a six week trial, and awarded Lexar over $380 million in damages.
Lexar shares went up over 99% after the news.
“There’s no question it’s a great shot in the arm to our bottom line,” said Lexar spokesman Jim Gustke. “This is not only a win for Lexar, but it’s a win for all companies with meaningful innovations.”
The jury also found that Toshiba’s and TAEC’s actions were oppressive, fraudulent or malicious, which supports an award of punitive damages. Evidence and argument will be presented to the jury tomorrow on the amount of punitive damages.
“The implications of this verdict to the flash memory industry are enormous and we appreciate that the jury took the time to understand difficult technical issues and to consider a wealth of evidence,” said Eric Whitaker, executive vice president and general counsel, Lexar. “This verdict validates Lexar’s core intellectual property and contributions to the flash memory industry. It holds Toshiba accountable for its conduct — building Lexar’s trust to acquire our technology and then betraying that trust to partner with our competitor and compete against us. It sends a clear message to Toshiba that this type of corporate conduct will not be tolerated — as a strategic partner and board member, Toshiba was required to act with the utmost good faith and fell far short of that standard.”
During the six-week trial, the jury heard over 4,000 pages of testimony and examined almost 400 exhibits. Lexar’s evidence was based in large part on Toshiba’s own internal documents that had previously been confidential within Toshiba. Key witnesses at the trial included Lexar’s founders, Petro Estakhri and Mike Assar, Toshiba senior executives Hideo Ito, Yoshihide Fujii and Kiyoshi Kobayashi, and SanDisk top executives Eli Harari and Sanjay Mehrotra.
Toshiba’s defense rested in large part on the argument that the disputed technology had been independently developed by Toshiba. The jury rejected that argument, recognizing Lexar’s important contributions to the development of NAND flash memory, particularly high performance system designs. These trade secrets included Lexar’s inventions regarding critical flash functions such as Parallel Write, Internal Page Copy, Pipelining, and Superblocks, aspects of which are also now the subject of multiple U.S. and foreign patents, including U.S. Patents 5,907,856; 6,034,897; 6,040,997; 6,081,878; 6,141,249 and 6,374,337.
Lexar’s claim for unfair competition, based on California Business and Professions Code Section 17200 was not given to the jury and will be decided by the Court. Lexar expects that the Court will rule on that claim as well as on anticipated post-trial motions shortly after a hearing currently scheduled for April 13, 2005.
Based on the jury’s verdict and findings, Lexar intends to ask the Court for an injunction that bars the sale of Toshiba’s products in the United States. Lexar will ask that the injunction include products that have been found to incorporate Lexar’s trade secrets, including Toshiba’s large and small block NAND flash chips, its CompactFlash, Secure Digital and xD Picture Card products. Though the length of the injunction will be determined by the Court, during the trial, there was testimony that it could take as long as eighteen months to implement the types of features Lexar disclosed to Toshiba. Lexar expects that the Court will hold a hearing on Lexar’s request for an injunction on April 13, 2005.
Murdok | Breaking eBusiness News
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