Mark Liang of O'Melveny & Myers LLP successfully represented Google and LG Electronics in disputes where they faced tens of millions of dollars in potential liabilities for alleged patent infringement, earning him a spot among the intellectual property attorneys under the age of 40 honored by Law360 as Rising Stars.

His biggest recent case:

Liang was lead counsel for LG in a case where Image Processing Technologies LLC accused it of infringing a patent related to using artificial intelligence to detect features in images. Image Processing had successfully defended the patent against Samsung and Canon based on a narrow claim construction that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office adopted. Because the validity had been repeatedly upheld, Image Processing had obtained large settlements from other defendants, according to Liang.

"The case is interesting not only because it dealt with AI patents but also because one of the reasons they won the prior cases is because there was this one patent claim that no one could defeat or invalidate," he said.

Liang said he developed a strategy to have the court construe the claim broadly so the arguments they made to distinguish prior art would no longer apply.

"That's a very unusual strategy in patent litigation. Normally, as the defendant, you want to construe the claims very narrowly, interpret them narrowly, and that way you can argue that they're not practiced by your accused products," he said.

The strategy worked. Liang briefed and argued the case at the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, which adopted LG's claim construction while rejecting the USPTO's prior construction and invalidating Image Processing's claim. The Federal Circuit affirmed the decision in January.

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