Lucent's Intellectual Property group may be in an unremarkable building located in a small town, but from the building if you go down the road, turn right, and go through two traffic lights you'd be looking at an interstate highway. That's I-78, which cuts across central New Jersey and heads right into Allentown, Pa. So when Lucent sued call center vendor Aspect Telecommunications in federal district court in Allentown, Aspect attorneys smelled a rat.
Aspect, a maker of call distribution phone switches and call center agent software, is located in San Jose, Calif. A fraction of Lucent's size, Aspect envisioned enormous expenses flying officials across the country defending against Lucent's claim that Aspect's TeleSet agent phone - and its WinSet for Windows software that lets call agents control calls from a PC - violated five Lucent patents.
So Aspect attorneys filed a motion to transfer the case to California, demanding to know what was so special about Allentown that Lucent had to file the case there. Almost everyone who worked on TeleSet and WinSet for Windows was still somewhere in Silicon Valley, they pointed out.
Lucent's answer? Aspect has at least two customer installations in the Allentown area - Advanta Corp. in Horsham, Pa. and First Union Corp. in Upper Darby, Pa. - wrote Lucent attorney Martin Landis to the judge. Besides, Landis argued, with Lucent's patent division located so close by, the Allentown location "will save Lucent a great deal of time and expense in transporting witnesses, documents and support personnel." Aspect's transfer motion failed, and shortly thereafter it settled with Lucent.
An even more popular location for Lucent patent cases is Wilmington, Del., where Lucent has sued Acer, Cisco, Newbridge, Periphonics, and several foreign microelectronics manufacturers. Technically, Lucent - along with many other U.S. corporations - is incorporated there. And an article posted on the Web site of one of Lucent's law firms in Wilmington - patent specialist Potter, Anderson & Corroon - extols the Wilmington court as a "friendly forum for intellectual property cases" where plaintiffs can be "reasonably confident" that cases won't be transferred if the defendant complains.
But Lucent attorneys haven't stopped there. When Cisco countersued Lucent in San Jose federal court, Lucent's attorneys from Kirkland & Ellis went to San Jose and asked the judge to transfer that lawsuit back to Delaware so that only one judge and jury would have to deal with the whose Lucent/Cisco fight. The judge declined.
As it happens, patent law almost always allows the plaintiff to choose its preferred site for the case. And Lucent officials make no bones about the fact that they like venues such as Allentown and Wilmington because the company's own people and files are located nearby. "Convenience is a big consideration for us," says Michael Greene, head of Lucent's intellectual-property business unit. What about the convenience of the defendant? "That's their problem," he says.
