1. Home
2. Daily News
3. Criticizing plaintiff's 'chutzpah,' federal…

Criticizing plaintiff's 'chutzpah,' federal judge holds lawyer jointly responsible for over $207K in legal fees

By Debra Cassens Weiss

August 29, 2024, 2:34 pm CDT

A federal judge in Houston is holding a lawyer and his client liable for more than $207,500 in their opponent’s legal fees, saying they filed a patent infringement lawsuit and continued to litigate it after the defendant “pointed out its obvious lack of merit.”

U.S. District Judge Lee H. Rosenthal of the Southern District of Texas required Houston lawyer William P. Ramey III and his client VDPP to pay the fees in their suit contending that a Volkswagen backup camera infringed VDPP’s patent, Reuters reports.

VDPP had argued that the fee award should be limited to the time spent defending “the exceptional portion of the case,” a reference to parts of a case found to be frivolous or unreasonable.

Rosenthal responded that the entire case was frivolous, and VDPP’s arguments displayed “chutzpah.”

“The entire case was exceptional, from the outset, for reasons that VDPP and its counsel knew,” wrote Rosenthal in her Aug. 13 decision. “There is no need to allocate the fees between the frivolous and nonfrivolous aspects of the case. It was all frivolous.”

VDPP sought future damages that were “clearly unrecoverable” because the patent had expired, Rosenthal wrote. The company sought past damages that were “clearly unrecoverable” because VDPP had not complied with marking requirements, she said.

And VDPP “lied about the existence of prior licensing agreements that confirmed the meritless nature of its case,” Rosenthal said.

In a prior decision, Rosenthal said settlement agreements licensing the VDPP patent did not require licensees to comply with marking requirements. VDPP had said there were no settlement agreements—only “agreements in principle,” Rosenthal said.

According to Reuters, Ramey and his law firm filed more than 100 suits this year, including at least 25 in which VDPP was the plaintiff. Federal judges have imposed fee sanctions in Ramey’s cases at least seven times in four years, according to Reuters. The sanctions total is at least $810,000, according to the wire service.

Ramey told Reuters in a statement that he and VDPP “respect all court orders. We appeal those orders we think are incorrect, as we have done in this case.”

Ramey did not immediately reply to an ABA Journal request for comment made in an email and in a message left with his firm.