Samsung asks for new Apple trial

Samsung has called for a new trial of its high-profile US patent case against Apple, suggesting the foreman of the jury which awarded the US group $1bn in damages may have been biased by an undisclosed lawsuit of his own.

The South Korean company said Velvin Hogan, the San Jose jury foreman, did not tell the court before the trial that he was sued in 1993 for breach of contract by Seagate, the computer storage manufacturer in which Samsung now holds a significant stake. Mr Hogan subsequently filed for personal bankruptcy.

The lawyer who acted for Seagate in the case against Mr Hogan two decades ago is the husband of a partner at Quinn Emanuel, the law firm which represented Samsung in San Jose.

Samsung is seeking to overturn August’s verdict in the international tussle over smartphone patents. The San Jose jury found widespread infringement by Samsung and tossed out the South Korean company’s own complaints against the iPhone maker.

“Mr Hogan’s failure to disclose the Seagate suit raises issues of bias that Samsung should have been allowed to explore in questioning,” Samsung said in a filing published on Tuesday.

Samsung said that had prevented its legal team from vetoing his participation as a juror. It added that it saw indications of bias in Mr Hogan’s post-trial media interviews.

“Mr Hogan’s public statements suggest that he failed to answer the court’s question truthfully ‘in order to secure a seat on the jury’, in which case bias is presumed,” Samsung wrote.

Samsung said Mr Hogan had told an interviewer that he wanted to “send a message to the industry at large that patent infringing is not the right thing to do” and “make sure the message we sent was not just a slap on the wrist”.

The South Korean company said Mr Hogan had used “incorrect and extraneous legal standards” that had “no place in the jury room”.

Samsung called for Mr Hogan’s conduct in pre-trial questioning to be “fully examined in a hearing with all jurors and can be cured only by a grant of new trial”.

Last month, Mr Hogan told Bloomberg that there had been “no misconduct” in the trial. In a separate interview, he told Reuters that he had not disclosed the Seagate case because he was not asked to disclose every case he had been involved in. But he did not blame Samsung for questioning his impartiality: “They’ve got a job to do and I don’t hold that against them”.

Elsewhere in its filings, Samsung challenged the jury’s findings that it had wilfully infringed Apple’s patents and restated its case that Apple’s asserted patents were invalid. Samsung also argued that there was insufficient evidence to support the $1bn damages awarded in the case and called for remittance.

Apple did not comment on the filings. The next hearing in the case in San Jose will be held in December.