But the Japanese couldn’t risk a trial. If they had lost, they could have been barred from exporting cars to the United States.
“You weigh your risks,” said Frederick Michaud, a patent lawyer who represented the Japanese automakers. “That is the difficulty with all patent litigation. How much is it going to cost to get out of it?”
Now, the focus turned on American automakers. They considered Lemelson and his attorney, Gerald Hosier, nothing more than predators.
“Ford, GM and Chrysler and Motorola desperately wanted to stop that trend, to stop the flow of money to Lemelson before it got started,” Hosier said. “They didn’t want to see me get money to fight them.”
While battling the Japanese, Hosier had also started sending form letters to hundreds of companies in 1989, accusing them of infringing Lemelson’s machine vision and bar code patents. It was, said Hosier, the single-greatest patent licensing campaign by an individual in history.
Many, such as Cognex in Natick, Mass., the world’s largest maker of machine vision, ignored the letters initially, thinking Lemelson’s claims were baseless.
But Hosier soon wrapped up other deals worth $350 million. Forbes declared him one of the highest-paid lawyers in the country and The American Lawyer put him on the cover.
The money didn’t change Lemelson, said Robert Lemelson, his son. He still drove that old Mercury Marquis and wore the same ratty wool sweater.
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