The jurors are free to ignore the lawyers and rely on the expert's testimony. But they're also free to conclude that said expert just provides the desired opinions on demand. I would guess the lack of time invested in performing the analysis counted for as much with the jury as the high fee; patent litigation tends to be long and tedious, and a jury is likely to reflect on the fact that they're being asked to spend much more of their valuable time on listening to and deliberating the competing claims, without being well-compensated themselves.
(It's worth recalling that most people don't want or simply can't afford to do jury duty because it barely pays for travel and food expenses; thus juries tend tobe made up of the financially independent or those with accommodating employers. Commercial litigation would look very different if juries were drawn from, say, the boards of firms in some other industrial sector, who were required to commit 1 month a year to dispute resolution on a pro bono basis and would more truly qualify as peers of the disputing parties.)
I'm guessing from the gp's description that the estimate of losses was ultimately derived from a lawyerly formula of a sort derived from previous judgments and arguments developed in law review journals, as opposed to an economic history of the business unit that had monetized the patents. If so, the nominally independent analysis is basically just putting a neutral face on a legalistic assessment that was done by counsel for both sides before the expert was hired.
lawyerly sort of ad hominem
True enough; juries respond to emotional cues, and an arched-eyebrow dismissal is more convincing than whiny remonstration or interrogative bluster. But juries are also emotionally intelligent, and if one party's side is all posture and little substance they're likely to pick up on that.
More generally, lay juries making decisions about patent cases that hinge on arcana like the ways a session could be embedded in a URL and the stateless nature of HTTP is just ... totally fucking absurd.
Yes, it's the lawyers' jobs to explain it to the jury so that they can understand it, but sometimes you just have throw you hands up in the air and say "this is absurd, we can't possibly expect you to get this".
Bench trials are honestly equally absurd, particularly when one party is a big tech company. Judges in the 9th circuit (CA) are known to be extremely favorable to big tech, and the conflicts of interest are obvious - big tech controls the judge's reputation and can offer a lot of future opportunities for people who agree with them on the law. It's like what happens when you sue the New York Times in New York.
Juries with competing experts are probably the fairest option, honestly. The people in the jury often don't have a horse in the race. Their job is to go through the elements of the patent and match them up to the supposed infringement and see if everything is there. It's not that hard.
Certain technology patents have also been subject to appeals based on what is patentable and what isn't (see Alice vs CLS Bank which invalidated a ton of patents). Those questions are more about technical issues than following the elements.
(It's worth recalling that most people don't want or simply can't afford to do jury duty because it barely pays for travel and food expenses; thus juries tend tobe made up of the financially independent or those with accommodating employers. Commercial litigation would look very different if juries were drawn from, say, the boards of firms in some other industrial sector, who were required to commit 1 month a year to dispute resolution on a pro bono basis and would more truly qualify as peers of the disputing parties.)
I'm guessing from the gp's description that the estimate of losses was ultimately derived from a lawyerly formula of a sort derived from previous judgments and arguments developed in law review journals, as opposed to an economic history of the business unit that had monetized the patents. If so, the nominally independent analysis is basically just putting a neutral face on a legalistic assessment that was done by counsel for both sides before the expert was hired.
lawyerly sort of ad hominem
True enough; juries respond to emotional cues, and an arched-eyebrow dismissal is more convincing than whiny remonstration or interrogative bluster. But juries are also emotionally intelligent, and if one party's side is all posture and little substance they're likely to pick up on that.