First up this week are Debevoise & Plimpton partners Megan Bannigan and David Bernstein and counsel Christopher Ford who led a team representing client WEX Inc. in securing a preliminary injunction against HP Inc. blocking the launch of HP’s “WEX” software platform. Senior U.S. District Judge John Woodcock Jr. in Portland, Maine, found this week that WEX was likely to succeed on the merits of its trademark claims because “the marks at issue are nearly identical, the products are similar, the parties use the same marketing terms to promote the products, the plaintiff’s marks are strong, and the plaintiff has put forth convincing evidence of actual confusion.” That says it! Bannigan argued the preliminary injunction motion for WEX. The team also included Debevoise associates Nicole Flores, Kendra Berry and John Hollingsworth, summer associates Meredith Phipps and Adam Litwin and local counsel Nolan Reichl and Gavin McCarthy of Pierce Atwood. 

A team at Cooley helped Niantic Inc., the company behind the Pokémon Go mobile game, beat back a patent challenge involving augmented reality technology brought by NantWorks. After previously whittling the three-patent case down to one, U.S. Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler in San Francisco granted summary judgment to Ninantic finding the remaining claims, which purported to cover an augmented reality platform system, unpatentable since they were directed to an abstract idea and lacked an inventive concept. The Cooley team included Heidi Keefe, Dena Chen, Alexandra Leeper, Patrick Lauppe, Juan Pablo González, Matt Brigham and Michael Rhodes.