Scott Weingaertner

Scott Weingaertner has devoted his thirty year career to helping clients prevail in their most challenging technology and life sciences disputes. Working closely together with his clients in commercial and IP litigation and arbitration, he and the teams he has led have won those clients’ most significant cases, preserving billions of dollars of shareholder value and keeping key products on the market.

Victories Scott has achieved with his clients and colleagues have included: Oracle v. Google, where he formed and led the team that prevailed as co-counsel for Google in the original case of alleged infringement by the Android smartphone platform of seven patents on Java and virtual machines, achieving a complete win on all patents and averting billions in damages in a case that the court called “The World Series of Patent Cases” and for which victory Scott and his colleagues were awarded Managing IP Law's Milestone Case of the Year; LG Electronics v. Dolby Labs, where Scott and his team filed for TRO and PI relief at the eve of winter holidays, on breach of contract, antitrust and tortious interference grounds based on Dolby's abuse of license audit rights and a threat to terminate a global audio license; CosmoKey Solutions GmbH v. Duo Security/Cisco, where Scott argued and won a rare Federal Circuit reversal of a Section 101 patent dismissal on behalf of the original inventor of multi-factor authentication, which Law360 hailed as one of the leading U.S. cases that year; Abiomed, Inc. v. Maquet Cardiovascular LLC, where the team Scott led prevailed twice on summary judgment in separate cases asserting a total of over seven patents covering the client's sole product line of intravascular blood pumps, clearing the way for a $16B+ acquisition of the client by Johnson & Johnson; and many more successful cases.

Scott has been recognized by a variety of Legal Directories, including Managing IP’s 2024 list of IP Stars, and recommended for Patent Litigation and Trade Secret Litigation by Legal 500, which noted that clients have praised Scott as a “Great lawyer in the courtroom,” and “a very experienced big picture lawyer, always civil and polite, but always on the pivotal points of the case, which he plays consequentially.” Clients have also commented that Scott’s “leadership qualities are truly exceptional and he has successfully cultivated a cohesive and high-performing team under his guidance. His ability to lead by example and maintain the team’s focus during such challenging circumstances has been nothing short of inspiring.”

Scott represents clients in a wide variety of technology-driven disputes. He has experience defending clients in consumer mass arbitration cases involving privacy, has handled controversies over supply contracts for mission-critical materials, conducted commercial litigation and arbitration over software license rights, multi-party life sciences licensing disputes and other cases. Over the years, Scott has developed particular expertise successfully handling cross-border disputes, representing entities based in Europe and Asia in U.S. technology-driven and life sciences cases.

Recognizing that technology and science evolve quickly, Scott and his colleagues work hard to avoid silos and instead collaborate across practice disciplines in order to best foresee and meet client needs – which increasingly fall between legal specialties in law firms and in-house legal departments. He assembles multi-disciplinary teams capable of identifying and exploiting theories that emerge at the interface of differing legal fields, including antitrust, contract law, IP law and business tort law, both in technology and life sciences disputes.

Before attending law school, Scott was an engineer and software developer in the field of AI and vehicle guidance, with undergraduate and advanced engineering degrees in computer-based control of complex systems. The first matter he worked on in a law firm, as summer associate in 1991, involved protecting methods of learning in neural networks. Scott has kept up with the field and received an Executive Program Certificate from MIT in Artificial Intelligence: Implications for Business Strategy.

The disputes Scott litigates and advises on frequently involve him and his team gaining an intimate understanding of sophisticated technology and science, as well as a deep grasp of our clients’ industries and business ecosystems. Some of the winning results he and his colleagues have achieved together are set out below:

• Led the team that served as litigation and trial counsel for Google in the landmark patent and copyright case brought by Oracle accusing Google’s Android mobile platform of infringing IP directed to the Java software platform. Scott led defenses that achieved a complete victory on all patent counts, a result which was not appealed, and his team won multiple Daubert motions striking Oracle’s damages expert reports multiple times and successfully averting over $6B in damages (the only payments were by Oracle compensating Google for its subsequent responsive damages reports and Daubert motions, as ordered by the court). The effort Scott led secured a complete successful defense of the Android platform from its most significant patent attack and was a rare successful challenge to the Java licensing program that preserved crucial competition in the mobile phone space*
• As lead trial counsel to one of the world's largest consumer electronics companies, Scott led a team in filing a successful emergency lawsuit, seeking a TRO and PI against the primary licensor of audio technology regarding its abusive licensing practices and related threats. The team pleaded violations of Section 2 of the Sherman Act, breach of contract, tortious interference and other causes of action, in response to which our adversary hired two of the nation's leading firms to defend it, yet within a matter of weeks settled on very favorable terms for our client and keeping billions of dollars of products on the market*
• Secured a complete victory on summary judgment for Abiomed, the sole developer of implantable heart pumps, following a remarkably successful claim construction result in the lead litigation of two multi-patent cases brought against it by Maquet Cardiovascular, targeting targeting Abiomed’s sole product line. With this victory, combined with a subsequent decisive win on claim construction in the second of the two actions, Scott’s team lifted the threat against the product line, clearing the way for a $16.6 billion dollar acquisition of the company by Johnson & Johnson*
• As lead trial and appellate counsel to the company that invented multi-factor network authentication, secured at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit a rare reversal of a dismissal under 35 U.S.C. Sec. 101, which Law 360 identified as one of the leading patent law wins of the year*
• As lead counsel for Biotronik in a case targeting cardiovascular devices, Scott’s team successfully secured dismissal of a case in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, in favor of a case pending in the plaintiff’s home court of the Northern District of Georgia*
• Defended a leading Asia-based biosimilars company and represented it in one of the earliest multi-party BPCIA cases in Delaware, guiding the client through its first ever U.S. patent litigation*
• As leader of a team representing a U.S.-based pharmaceutical company in a dispute with a major university based in the United Kingdom on issues of contract law and inventorship*
• On behalf of a leading insurtech company facing an attempt by a European competitor to clone the client’s business model and outmaneuver it in the market, Scott assembled a team that brought a software copyright case on short notice, leading the adversary to dismiss its counsel, hire prominent new trial counsel and quickly (and cost effectively) voluntarily cease its attempts to copy our client’s business*
• Took over the defense of Motorola as lead counsel, as well as leader of a large joint defense group late in the case, opposing a well-known industry wide enforcement action. Scott’s team quickly took discovery the joint defense group had overlooked, deposed the inventor for two full days, and filed a summary judgment of non-infringement and inequitable conduct, which allowed Motorola to secure a highly favorable result for his client and, eventually, for several prominent video game developers that marketed apps running on Android*
• Led a cross-disciplinary team in an arbitration in London of a license dispute on behalf of a Swiss-based operating system developer against Oracle, in which Oracle engaged in abusive licensing practices regarding the Java Platform. The team Scott led asserted breach of contract and copyright infringement causes of action, as well as violations of FRAND commitments. After two vigorously argued hearings before the arbitral tribunal, the team Scott led successfully overturned, before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, a district court’s attempt to hear the case despite the terms of the Java arbitration clause. The team he led also and successfully secured antisuit injunctions against Oracle’s attempts to sue our client for copyright infringement in district court, and secured a favorable settlement for our client, believed to be one of only three successful challenges to the Java Platform licensing program*

* Denotes experience prior to joining Goodwin.

Scott was previously a partner at White & Case LLP. Earlier in his career, he served as senior in-house counsel for a large European corporation, responsible for all IP issues for a number of large subsidiaries.

• Recommended Lawyer, Patent Litigation: Full Coverage and Trade Secrets – Legal 500 US – 2024
• Leading Lawyer, IAM Strategy 300 – The World’s Leading IP Strategists – 2017, 2018, 2019
• IAM Patent 1000 2017 described Scott as someone who “wins cases by being on top of the facts and by knowing the law better than the other side. He is a very intelligent lawyer and really puts his clients first”
• Best Lawyers 2017, Litigation – Patent
• Leading Lawyer, IAM Patent 1000 – 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019
• Managing IP Law, Milestone Case of the Year 2013

• Panelist and Speaker, “Exploring the Things in the Internet of Things:  Implications for Business, Consumers, and the Law,” New York Law School, February 3, 2017
• Co-Author, “Patent Law in 2016: Seeing Clarity in the Wake of Reform,” Practising Law Institute 11th Annual Patent Law Institute, March 2017
• Co-Author, “Supreme Court & Federal Circuit Tip the Patent Scales in 2014,” Practising Law Institute 9th Annual Patent Law Institute, February 2015
• Co-Author, “Licensors face new challenges after the US Supreme Court's decision in MedImmune v. Genentech,” International Journal of Technology Transfer and Commercialisation, 2009
• Co-Author, “Software Exportation Dodges Bullet: US Supreme Court Reins in Extraterritorial Effect of US Software Patents in Microsoft v. AT&T,” European Intellectual Property Review, November 11, 2008
• Co-Author, “Rendezvous with Obviousness: US Supreme Court Reckons with Patentability in KSR InternationalCo. v. Telefl ex Inc. and Lower Courts React,” European Intellectual Property Review, July 7, 2008
• Co-Author, “US Supreme Court Holds That Patent Licensee Need Not Repudiate License Before Challenging Licensed Patent in Court: MedImmune, Inc. v. Genentech, Inc.,” European Intellectual Property Review, July 2007
• Co-Author, “US Supreme Court Rules on Permanent Injunctions in Cases of Patent Infringement: eBay v MercExchange,” European Intellectual Property Review, September 2006
• Contributor, “New Patent Cases Raise Fundamental Legal Issues,” IP Law 360, May 15, 2006