As the company prepares to defend itself against claims by Bay State startup Singular Computing LLC, U.S. District Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV granted Singular's request that neither side be allowed to research potential jurors' social media activity or other publicly available information during the jury selection process, which began Monday. Opening statements are slated for Tuesday morning.
Judge Saylor said that Singular's request raised concerns about protecting juror privacy and what he described in a brief order as "the potential asymmetric advantage due to the disparity of resources of the parties."
The prohibition on researching jurors will end once the panel is seated, the judge said.
"Once the jury is empaneled, and only at that point, parties may conduct reasonable inquiries of publicly available sources to ascertain basic background information concerning the sworn jurors," Judge Saylor wrote. "Google's counsel may use its search engine as part of that process, but only to the same extent that any member of the public could do so."
The concerns Judge Saylor highlighted will be mitigated once the jury is sworn in, he wrote, "as both parties at that point will have a relatively equal opportunity to conduct reasonable research into the limited number of empaneled jurors."
The same two-page order also blocked, at Singular's request, Google from using any nonpublic data it may have to learn more about the jury pool.
Judge Saylor wrote that Google's lawyers stated "unequivocally" that they will not use data from jurors who may already use Google products and services, but added that "nonetheless the potential for unwarranted (and asymmetrical) invasion of jurors' privacy is sufficiently substantial that an order prohibiting such conduct is warranted."
A Google representative reiterated what the company's lawyers have said about using private information in litigation.
"We've of course never done this, there's no evidence that we would, and the judge didn't find anything to the contrary," José Castañeda told Law360 Monday.
An attorney for Singular did not respond to a comment request Monday afternoon.
Singular has accused Google of making unauthorized use of its patent-protected technologies to boost the power of some of Google's most popular products. The tech giant allegedly infringed three patents that cover computer architectures aimed at increasing the efficiency of programs that use artificial intelligence.
In a bid to score a pretrial win, Google argued in April that Singular was effectively trying to "patent math" and said the claims fail the U.S. Supreme Court's two-step Alice test. The judge denied that motion in July.
The patents-in-suit are U.S. Patent Nos. 8,407,273; and 9,218,156.
Singular is represented by Paul J. Hayes, Matthew D. Vella, Kevin Gannon, Daniel McGonagle, Brian Seeve, Robert R. Gilman, Aaron S. Jacobs, Jeffrey Jackson Pyle and Adam R. Doherty of Prince Lobel Tye LLP, and Kerry L. Timbers of Sunstein LLP.
Google is represented by Gregory F. Corbett, Nathan R. Speed, Elizabeth A. DiMarco and Anant K. Saraswat of Wolf Greenfield & Sacks PC, Robert Van Nest, Michelle Ybarra, Andrew Bruns, Vishesh Narayen, Christopher S. Sun, Anna Porto, Deeva Shah and Stephanie J. Goldberg of Keker Van Nest & Peters LLP, Michael S. Kwun and Asim Bhansali of Kwun Bhansali Lazarus LLP, and Matthias A. Kamber of Paul Hastings LLP.
The case is Singular Computing LLC v. Google LLC, case number 1:19-cv-12551, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts.
--Additional reporting by Brian Dowling. Editing by Adam LoBelia.
For a reprint of this article, please contact reprints@law360.com.
