Stephen Payne of Irell & Manella LLP has advised clients on disputes worth hundreds of millions, including as part of the team that secured what his firm calls the third-largest patent verdict in the U.S. on behalf of chipmaker Netlist Inc., earning him a spot among the fund formation law practitioners under age 40 honored by Law360 as Rising Stars.

The biggest case of his career:

In 2023, Payne was on the Irell team that secured a $303 million willful infringement verdict for chipmaker Netlist Inc. against Samsung. The firm said it was the third-largest patent verdict in the U.S. that year — though two of the five patents Samsung was found to have infringed were deemed invalid by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board earlier this year. The Texas jury's $303 million award came shortly after another jury found that Micron Technology Inc. willfully infringed a pair of computer memory patents belonging to Netlist, which were also affected by the PTAB decision.

"Part of what's been challenging about it is managing a large number of trials in a short space of time," Payne said of the Netlist litigation.

The PTAB found the claims in the three other Netlist patents were invalid as well. The five patents were the same ones at issue in the Micron suit, plus a sixth that was also deemed invalid.

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