When a chip-design dispute turned on whether copied RTL code read on the asserted claims, Law & Forensics' testifying expert walked the jury through the source code line by line — and the testimony survived Daubert and cross-examination intact.
The situation
A fabless semiconductor company brought patent and trade-secret claims against a competitor it alleged had incorporated copied register-transfer-level (RTL) code into a competing chip. The case lived or died on questions a jury would never encounter in daily life: where the accused code came from, whether it was functionally equivalent to the protected design, and whether the accused product actually practiced the asserted patent claims.
Opposing counsel made its strategy clear early — it would move under Daubert to exclude any source-code expert whose methodology it could portray as subjective or results-driven. Our client needed an expert whose analysis was not only correct but demonstrably reliable, reproducible, and admissible.
Our approach
Law & Forensics provided a testifying expert whose independence and methodology were the work product, not merely the conclusion. The engagement ran in parallel workstreams:
Independent source-code review. Working inside a secured, access-controlled review environment, the expert examined thousands of RTL and supporting files, documenting provenance indicators, comment artifacts, and structural fingerprints — never relying on the client's characterization of the evidence.
Claim-to-code mapping. The expert constructed a rigorous file-by-file and limitation-by-limitation mapping tying each asserted claim element to specific lines of the accused design, producing a claim chart that could be defended element by element on cross-examination.
Daubert-ready documentation. Every analytical step — tooling, sampling, comparison criteria — was recorded so the methodology could be independently reproduced, directly neutralizing the anticipated reliability challenge.
Jury-facing translation. The expert built demonstratives that rendered dense hardware-description logic into plain, visual narratives, preparing testimony that a lay jury could follow without sacrificing technical precision.
The impact
The court denied the Daubert motion and admitted the testimony. At trial, the expert presented the claim-to-code mapping to the jury and withstood extended cross-examination. The jury returned a verdict for our client on the core infringement claims, vindicating both the substance of the analysis and the rigor of the methodology behind it.
| Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| Source-code files independently reviewed | 4,000+ |
| Daubert challenge outcome | Testimony admitted |
| Asserted claims mapped to accused code | Complete claim chart |
| Trial outcome on core claims | Verdict for client |
