Pillsbury Leads Offshore Technical Compliance to Victory After Two Years of Patent Infringement Litigation in Texas

OTC is an engineering consultancy firm that provides blowout preventer testing services in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere. IPT sued OTC, alleging that OTC’s techniques for early detection of oilwell leaks infringed IPT’s patented methods captured in U.S. Patent No. 9,207,143. OTC petitioned the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) in inter partes review that all claims of IPT’s patent were obvious combinations of prior techniques, and presented the PTAB testing protocols provided in government-issued testing manuals and computational methods employed years before the IPT patent was filed. The PTAB agreed. All claims of the patent were found obvious. IPT presented amended claims, but OTC successfully argued that none of the amended claims were patentable.  The PTAB issued an order invalidating all claims of the patent and finding unpatentable each of the proposed amended claims, allowing OTC to continue providing its clients its blowout prevention services.

The Pillsbury team was led by Intellectual Property partners Brian Nash, Josh Tucker and counsel Steven Tepera. The full team included Cody Gartman, Lisa Nicholas and summer associates Josh Graham and Jacob Young.