Gavin Snyder is Of Counsel in Quinn Emanuel’s Seattle office. His practice focuses on patent litigation. In addition to district court litigation, he has significant experience with pre-litigation counseling, proceedings before the International Trade Commission, and IPR matters before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board. Gavin has worked on cases involving a wide array of technologies, including haptics, microprocessor architecture, 4G LTE wireless protocols, video streaming, photolithography, RNA interference, power management for mobile devices, mobile mapping software, mobile Internet browsing, load balancing, and computer security using machine learning.
Before law school, Gavin worked as a computer programmer for various companies in the video game, computer-aided design, and web industries. He was a programmer on four PC video games from Westwood Studios, including Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 and Nox.
- Qualcomm
- BlackBerry
- Nokia
- TSMC
- IBM
- Salesforce
- Hyundai
- Cerebras
- Vestas
- DocuSign
- Immersion
- Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation
- Alnylam Pharmaceuticals
- Max Planck Institute
- Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Secured a jury verdict against Facebook in the Western District of Texas awarding $174.5 million and a running royalty for Voxer. The weeklong trial ended in a unanimous verdict that Facebook and Instagram Live used two Voxer patents related to Voxer’s Live Messaging and Store-and-Stream technologies. The jury deliberated for just 2.5 hours, found all six asserted claims across the two patents infringed, affirmed patent validity, and awarded running royalties in addition to the damages award. The two Voxer patents expire in 2028.
- Represented Nokia in a patent dispute in the Eastern District of Texas against Sol IP where Sol IP alleged infringement of over a dozen patents by Nokia base stations. Obtained summary judgment of invalidity under 35 U.S.C. § 251.
- Represented Qualcomm against Apple in patent litigation in the Southern District of California and the International Trade Commission. After an eight day trial, a jury found that Apple infringed all three asserted patents. These results helped drive the successful settlement of the parties’ global dispute before any of Apple’s offensive claims were ever heard by a jury, resulting in billions of dollars of chip sales and licensing revenues for Qualcomm.
- Represented DocuSign against RPost in patent litigation regarding automatic email response technology. The case settled successfully after the majority of claims asserted in the case were invalidated.
- Represented Immersion in a multi-patent action against Apple in the International Trade Commission. The dispute involved several Immersion patents relating to tactile feedback technologies. After the ITC case went to trial before the chief administrative law judge, the case settled on favorable terms.
- Represented the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, the patent management and licensing entity for the University of Wisconsin, in a computer microarchitecture patent infringement lawsuit against Apple. In October 2015, the jury returned a verdict in favor of WARF, finding all asserted claims valid and infringed and awarding WARF $234.2 million in damages.
- Represented Alnylam, the Max Planck Institute, the Whitehead Institute, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology against the University of Utah in a dispute over inventorship rights to fundamental patents in the RNA interference (gene silencing) field. The district court granted summary judgment against the University of Utah on all claims. The University of Utah did not appeal the district court's ruling.
- Represented BlackBerry against Unwired Planet in patent litigation regarding mobile Internet technology. Unwired Planet stipulated to non-infringement and withdrew its complaint on the eve of trial, after the ITC issued a claim construction order under which Unwired Planet admitted that there was no infringement. In subsequent proceedings in the District of Delaware, the district court entered the identical claim construction, and Unwired Planet again stipulated to judgment of non-infringement. The Federal Circuit affirmed the district court's claim construction and judgment of non-infringement.
- Columbia Law School
(J.D., 2011)- James Kent Scholar
- Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar
- Carroll G. Harper Prize for intellectual property studies
- Columbia Science and Technology Law Review
- Articles Editor
- Articles Editor
- Columbia College
(B.A., Computer Science and English Literature, 1999)
- The State Bar of Washington
- The State Bar of California
- United States District Court:
- Central District of California
- Southern District of California
- Northern District of California
- Western District of Washington
- United States Court of Appeals:
- Federal Circuit
- Irell & Manella LLP
- Associate, 2011-2018
- Rethinking the Mental Steps Doctrine and Other Barriers to Patentability of Artificial Intelligence, 19 Colum. Sci. & Tech. L. Rev. 313.