Patrick Shields (left) and Kenneth M. Fitzgerald (Courtesy photos)

A Southern California jury on Wednesday gave Viasat Inc. every dollar of the $49 million it was seeking in contract claims against Acacia Communications Inc. But it delivered a mixed bag on Viasat's trade secrets claims following a monthlong trial in northern San Diego County.

Superior Court jurors found that Acacia willfully and maliciously misappropriated Viasat trade secrets on fiber optic technology but delivered damages of only $1 on the trade secret portion of the case. Carlsbad-based Viasat had been seeking as much as $280 million in trade secret damages.

Viasat said it intends to seek additional royalties for the post-discovery period plus its attorneys fees. The case has been litigated over the past 3½ years in both state and federal court, with Fitzgerald Knaier's Kenneth Fitzgerald, Warren Lex's Patrick Shields and Associate General Counsel Colin Ward leading the way for Viasat.

“We're very, very pleased with the verdicts,” Ward said Wednesday afternoon. “It's a good day.”

Jurors also rejected Acacia's counterclaims for breach of contract and conversion. They found Viasat did misappropriate Acacia's trade secrets but found Viasat did not act willfully and again awarded $1. Acacia's lead trial attorney, Wolf, Greenfield & Sacks partner Michael Albert, did not immediately respond to an email requesting comment Wednesday afternoon.

The verdict comes a week after Cisco Systems Inc. announced that it intends to acquire Massachusetts-based Acacia for $2.6 billion.

The dispute stems from a collaboration 10 years ago in which Acacia hired Viasat to help design the chips used in Acacia's 100-gigabit-per-second fiber optic modems. Under the parties' license agreement, Viasat provided confidential coding structure for, among other things, soft decision forward error correction, or SDFEC, a method of encoding and decoding packet data to ensure against corrupted transmissions.

All went fine until Acacia began rolling out next generation products designed for 400 and 1,200 gigabit speeds. Acacia originally said it designed them without any help from Viasat, but at trial argued that whatever Viasat material it used was covered by the parties' license agreement.

“You don't deny doing something, if you had a right to do it,” Fitzgerald said during closing arguments last week. “Acacia had no right to use Viasat's SDFEC without paying royalties.”

Jurors awarded $49,303,982, the precise figure Fitzgerald had requested for unpaid royalties plus late fees. Fitzgerald had further argued that Acacia was unjustly enriched by $361 million based on trade secrets Viasat had shared under the license agreement. He asked jurors to award 80% of that amount, or about $280 million, but said they also could award 50% or 25%. In the end they awarded $1.

Albert had told jurors that there was no evidence Viasat considered its designs trade secrets until the litigation began and that Acacia hadn't shared them with anyone else.

Viasat's Ward said on Wednesday that the company intends to ask Superior Court Judge Timothy Casserly for additional royalties based on Acacia sales since the close of discovery and for attorneys fees. That will include cost-of-proof sanctions based on Acacia's pretrial denials of liability, he said.

Fitzgerald said Wednesday that, while the technology in the case was complex, “we tried to tell a simple story. We tried to present it as a simple case of thefts and lies,” he said. “You don't deny doing stuff if you really had a right to do it.”

Also representing Viasat were Fitzgerald Knaier's Joseph McGeady and Warren Lex's Matthew Warren.