You might say William Lee and Joseph Mueller were in a good position heading into trial in Delaware on behalf of Intel Corp. The day it began, the judge compared their opponent's case to someone “floating off into the inky blackness of space with no hope of survival or rescue.”

Lee and Mueller, veteran intellectual property attorneys at Wilmer Cutler Hale Pickering and Dorr, had succeeded through Daubert motions the week prior in excluding almost all expert damages testimony in the years-long patent fight brought by AVM Technologies LLC.

Winning that battle left AVM–and its star-studded trial team from Boies Schiller Flexner and Irell & Manella with the not-so-desirable option of using one of Intel's own experts to testify on damages. And poof, like that, a suit that the plaintiff had once claimed was worth up to $2 billion was now being put forward as maybe worth $3.5 million.