Goodwin has secured a victory for three defendants alleging fraud and breach of contract in a long-running earn-out payment dispute with chip-designing software company Silvaco. A Silicon Valley jury awarded $11.3 million in damages for breach of contract and $6.6 million in damages for fraud against each of the three defendants. The trial began in Santa Clara County, California, Superior Court on May 28 and concluded on July 23. Goodwin’s team was led by Northern California Litigation partners Brett Schuman and Jennifer Fisher.
“We proved every single thing that we set out to prove in this case. And that doesn’t happen all the time,” Schuman said to Law.com. “I can’t tell you how happy we are for our clients,” Schuman said. “Our clients were individuals who built this company … took it through a bankruptcy in 2012, invested their own money. And this was a very mission-oriented case for the plaintiffs. They put everything they had into the company and … litigation’s not cheap. They put a lot into this. They believed in it. And so we are so happy for our clients to have been able to achieve this result for them.”