First up this week are lawyers at McKool Smith and Keller Postman, who helped the Office of the Attorney General of Texas secure a $1.4 billion settlement with Meta Platforms Inc. on claims brought under the state’s Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier Act of 2009. The biometric privacy law carries penalties of up to $25,000 per violation for companies that take the biometric identifiers of Texans for a commercial purpose without their informed consent. The state claimed Facebook’s abandoned “tag suggestions” feature captured the facial geometry of users and non-users alike. The company previously agreed to pay $650 million in 2020 to settle a class action brought under a similar Illinois biometric privacy law targeting the feature. Zina Bash of Keller Postman and Sam Baxter and Jennifer Truelove of McKool Smith served as lead counsel. The McKool Smith team also included principals John Briody, Kevin Burgess, Charles Fowler, Rick Halper, Eric Hansen, Lew LeClair, Radu Lelutiu and Robert Manley and associates Asena Baran, Caroline Burks, Michael Catapano, Joseph Micheli, Taylor Perez, Carra Rentie and Lauren Simenauer. The Keller Postman team included Nick Larry, Jessica Beringer, Ashley Keller, J.J. Snidow, Alex Dravillas, Kiran Bhat, Zach Clark, Rosie Romano, Branden Weber, Andray Napolez and Randall Newman, as well as legal support staff led by Marla Bernal.

Greg Arovas, Todd Friedman, Brandon Brown and Chris Lawless of Kirkland & Ellis helped Intel Corp. fend off claims from the last of 12 patents initially asserted in 2019 by Swiss intellectual property licensing outfit PACT XPP Schweiz AG. A core team of more than 50 Kirkland lawyers and paralegals have worked on the matter for Intel, including at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, where six of the patents were invalidated via inter partes review. U.S. District Judge Joshua Wolson, sitting by designation in Delaware, last week granted summary judgment to Intel on the last remaining patent, finding that PACT improperly took positions in patent prosecution that contradicted arguments it made in litigation. “[A] patentee cannot have his claim and eat it, too,” the judge wrote.