Inside Baseball: SouthBank Legal Used Its Unique Knowledge of an (Unwritten) Local Court Practice to Secure an Astounding Recovery

Working with an AmLaw 10 firm, SouthBank Legal helped one of the country’s leading children’s hospital systems attain a total victory in the Northern District of Indiana against one of the world’s largest orthopedic manufacturers. After years of fruitless negotiations and stalling by the manufacturer, the hospital was left with no choice but to file suit. Through its national counsel, the hospital retained SouthBank Legal to aggressively pursue recovery of almost $100M of unpaid patent royalties and punitive damages. Consistent with its pre-suit tactics, the manufacturer used every trick in the book to stall the action (including multiple change of judge requests, intra-district transfers, and protracted discovery). This was an effort, as admitted by the manufacturer’s lead trial attorney after the case, to “bleed [the children’s hospital] into submission.” But the hospital stayed the course, creatively working with national counsel and SouthBank Legal to keep its litigation spend within budget. Tapping the experience of its multiple former law clerks, SouthBank Legal suggested a creative strategy—based on a little known, unpublished practice by the sitting judge. SouthBank Legal correctly anticipated that the court would send the parties to mediate with a specific magistrate at an exact point in the case. And SouthBank Legal knew how this magistrate would conduct the mediation. Long story short, the manufacturer paid the hospital in full.