SAN FRANCISCO — Judge William Alsup punctuated a courtroom-steps settlement in a novel trademark case by asking the lawyers to rewrite the agreement on the fly and apologize to the jury pool for wasting their morning.
It was the latest dramatic turn in a case that had been set for trial Tuesday morning, featuring two leading IP lawyers: Michael Jacobs for software giant Autodesk Inc. and Claude Stern for Dassault Systèmes SolidWorks Corp. The case raised the unique issue of whether a software company could trademark a widely used name for a type of computer file.
