Greene Espel PLLP won a substantial patent infringement jury verdict in St. Paul, Minn. In mid-March on behalf of its client, Solutran. Solutran offers a service for paper check processing called SPIN™ (Solutran POS and Imaging Network) that is widely used by grocery stores and pharmacies in the U.S. In Solutran v. U.S. Bancorp and Elavon, Inc., the jury found all four claims at issue in U.S. Patent No. 8,311,945 to be valid, and awarded $3.27 million in damages to Solutran against the defendants.
The Greene Espel team was comprised of Bob Gilbertson, Sybil Dunlop, David Wallace-Jackson and Eric Ernstene. At trial, the Greene Espel team presented evidence to the jury heard evidence that U.S. Bancorp’s subsidiary Elavon provided its infringing check-processing service to several companies, including Target Corp. and Barnes & Noble. The jury considered U.S. Bancorp’s allegation that the patent claims were invalid in light of prior art and the issue of damages for U.S. Bancorp’s infringement. The jury’s verdict awarded Solutran lost-profits damages on some of the infringing transactions processed with Elavon’s Outsourced Imaging service and adopted Solutran’s royalty computation for the other transactions.
U.S. Bancorp had previously challenged the ’945 patent’s validity in a Covered Business Method proceeding at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, but lost that challenge in a decision affirmed by the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals in 2016. The jury’s verdict of validity was in response to a U.S. Bancorp challenge based on different prior art from that considered in the PTAB proceeding.
“We will soon file motions asking the court to issue an injunction and seeking other post-trial relief,” said Dunlop.