How an American tech company won a $25 million lawsuit with fake emails

After winning a verdict of nearly $25 million in a federal trade secrets case earlier this year, Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld has filed a motion to withdraw from its representation of LBDS Holding Company, LLC. Noting that it is unusual to do so after a favorable jury verdict and while a motion for judgment is pending, the law firm says in a Wednesday filing in the Eastern District of Texas case that a May 14 sanctions motion filed by the defendant, ISOL Technology, is essentially justified. The sanctions motion contends that “LBDS and its principals manufactured and falsified evidence used in this litigation, testified falsely, and committed a fraud upon this Court,” as the Akin Gump motion describes the allegations.

Imagine that you’re a lawyer, a partner at a powerhouse firm in the US, who has just spent the last three years litigating an intellectual property case against a South Korean company in a Texas court. Imagine that you finally plowed through a six-day jury trial involving key e-mails as evidence, then imagine that you won a $25 million payday for your clients. Time to celebrate? Sure, until you find out that your three years of work relied in part on a series of faked e-mails that your own client had purposely created—and that the FBI was investigating. Now imagine how quickly you might want out of the whole matter. The battle of the acronyms began back in August 2011, when LBDS Holding Company sued South Korean company ISOL Technology over magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) tech. An MRI can produce incredible interior images of the body, but the technique famously requires the patient to remain still—a problem when trying to image the always-beating human heart. LBDS said it had developed “highly confidential, proprietary technology” to solve the problem, which was to have been incorporated into ISOL MRI machines, imported into the US, and sold under LBDS’ private label.