Jordan Sigale practices in intellectual property, computer and patent law with a focus on patent and trade secret litigation and alternative dispute resolution. His work also extends to client counseling on issues of corporate and strategic planning involving copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets. He is extensively involved in patent prosecution for a variety of clients with specific focus on the interface between computers and end-users in an array of situations and transactions.
A hallmark of Jordan's work is his approach to finding creative, practical ways to achieve clients' immediate and long-range business goals by applying intellectual property licensing, procurement, and litigation strategies. He first strives to understand his clients' business histories and goals through in-depth conversations and then collaborates with and guides clients through strategic decision-making processes.
Jordan has served as lead litigation and trial counsel in district courts throughout the U.S. involving a variety of intellectual property issues including computer intrusion, copyright infringement, false advertising, design and utility patent infringement, trade secret misappropriation and trademark infringement. He has also served as lead litigation and trial counsel on a variety of antitrust claims, usually focused on the antitrust-intellectual property interface. Jordan has been extensively involved in coordinating foreign intellectual property litigation strategy in Australia, China, Europe, and Hong Kong.
His litigation work has involved diverse technologies including cable television systems; chemical compositions (ceramics, ink, and pharmaceuticals, for example); consumer electronics (DVD players, small kitchen electrics, personal care devices, and toys, among others); lab equipment (spectrophotometers, for example); LED devices; lighting fixtures and power supplies; medical devices (for example, laser devices, orthopedic devices, and radiological devices); packaging; software; and telephony (including cellular, cordless, and wired).
In the last 10 years, Jordan has successfully handled four preliminary injunction motions as lead trial counsel, three of which involved alleged patent infringement and one of which involved trade secret misappropriation. He also defended two of these patent infringement preliminary injunction victories on appeal before the Federal Circuit. In the same period, Jordan also won a preliminary injunction motion for his client in a patent infringement case (the case settled favorably while on expedited appeal to the Federal Circuit).
Jordan has successfully combined his deep litigation experience with his extensive knowledge of U.S. and foreign patent prosecution practice. As an active member of the patent bar, he has prepared and prosecuted patent applications in the U.S. in the chemical, electrical, electrochemical, and mechanical arts including business methods; cable television equipment; computer circuits (including multiprocessor designs); computer peripherals such as laser printers and user input devices; cosmetic preparations; electronic toys, electrical testing apparatuses, fiber optics, high-end audio circuitry; kitchen appliances, medical devices, networking devices and methods, personal care devices; semiconductor design and fabrication, paperboard and plastic containers, RF equipment, signal processing software, speech recognition software, and telephony-related inventions. Jordan has also worked closely with an extensive network of foreign patent lawyers to prosecute patent and utility model applications world-wide for his clients. This experience allows him to consider multiple jurisdictions and venues, including inter partes proceedings at the U.S. Patent Office, in mapping potential client strategies.
Jordan has substantial experience in developing strategies in view of the Hatch-Waxman Act and litigating the ensuing infringement, validity, and enforceability of pharmaceutical patents on behalf of generic and branded pharmaceutical companies. Most recently, he took a leading role in a multi-week bench trial involving seven Orange Book-listed patents covering issues of non-infringement, invalidity, and inequitable conduct. A few months prior to trial, he briefed and argued an emergency appeal involving a case of first impression before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit involving the statutory 3-month stay provided under the Act. He has also had the rare experience of litigating a pharmaceutical patent infringement case for presentation to a jury in a case that settled following a number of successful pretrial rulings, jury selection, and opening statements.
Jordan has served as lead litigation counsel on four U.S. District Court cases involving trade secret antitrust and patent antitrust claims. In these cases he successfully argued the summary judgment motions before the District Court and U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit that led to the U.S. Supreme Court's seminal decision in Independent Ink, Inc. v. Illinois Tool Works Inc. clearly abolishing any presumption of market power in a Sherman Act Section 1 "patent-tying" claim, thus upholding the favorable summary judgment ruling for his clients in the District Court.
His experience with the patent antitrust interface reaches back to his extensive involvement on the trial and appellate teams in the mid-1990s in C.R. Bard v. M3 Systems (a medical device patent infringement action also involving patent-based Section 1 and 2 antitrust claims as well as non-patent based monopolization claims). In between his two high-profile patent antitrust cases, Jordan has continued to work in the antitrust area providing advice and opinions involving antitrust issues related to a broad range of activities, but most particularly issues involving technology distribution and exploitation.
