Federal Civil Bench Trials: Written Direct Testimony, Proposed Findings, and Judgments That Survive Appeal

R. David Donoghue, Partner | Holland & Knight LLP

R. David Donoghue is a first-chair intellectual property trial lawyer and partner in Holland & Knight’s Chicago office, where he serves as the firm’s nationwide intellectual property practice lead while maintaining an active trial docket. He was first chair in a standard essential patent (SEP) damages bench trial that ended in a significant defense victory for hardware manufacturers, and he has tried patent and Computer Fraud and Abuse Act cases to jury verdicts. His practice covers patent, trade secret, trademark, and copyright disputes in federal district courts, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and the U.S. Patent Trial and Appeal Board.

• Education & Credentials

Mr. Donoghue began his legal career as a law clerk to the Honorable Gordon J. Quist of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan. He earned his J.D., cum laude, from Georgetown University Law Center and served as Current Developments Editor for the Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics. He holds a B.S.E. in Aerospace Engineering, magna cum laude, from the University of Michigan.
He is admitted to practice in California, Illinois, and Michigan, and before the U.S. Supreme Court; the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the Federal, Sixth, and Ninth Circuits; the U.S. District Courts for the Central and Eastern Districts of California, the Northern, Central, and Southern Districts of Illinois, the Western District of Michigan, the Eastern District of Texas, and the Western District of Wisconsin; and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

• Recognition & Leadership

Mr. Donoghue is ranked by Chambers USA for Intellectual Property (2021–2026) and recognized by The Best Lawyers in America for Patent Law (2015–2027), Litigation – Patent (2016–2027), and Litigation – Intellectual Property (2019–2027). Lawdragon has named him to its 500 Leading Litigators in America (2022, 2024–2027), and IAM Patent 1000 has listed him among the world’s leading patent litigators since 2014, describing him as “a practical lawyer who gets right to the heart of any matter.”
He has also been recognized by The Legal 500 USA for patent litigation (2026), Illinois Super Lawyers (2014–2027), Thomson Reuters as a Stand-Out Lawyer (2026), Managing Intellectual Property as an IP Star (2013–2021), and The Irish Legal 100 (2020–2023). He holds a Martindale-Hubbell AV Preeminent peer review rating and is a recipient of the Chicago Bar Association Herman Kogan Media Award.

• Professional Involvement

Mr. Donoghue serves as Vice Chair of the IP Litigation Committee of the Intellectual Property Law Association of Chicago (2020–present) and is a member of the Federal Bar Association. He has taught legal research, writing, and intellectual property courses as an adjunct professor at Loyola University Chicago
School of Law and served on the Law360 Intellectual Property Editorial Advisory Board (2018, 2019). He is the founder and principal author of the Chicago IP Litigation and Retail Patent Litigation blogs and serves on the boards of the University of Michigan Aerospace Engineering Alumni Association and the University of Michigan College of Engineering Alumni Board.

• Experience

Mr. Donoghue’s trial work includes serving as first chair in an SEP damages bench trial that produced a significant defense victory for hardware manufacturers. In a patent dispute over the manufacture of milk sugars, he won a Daubert challenge that excluded the plaintiff’s entire damages expert opinion and led to a settlement weeks before trial. Before juries, he secured a complete plaintiff’s verdict in the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware for an airline client in a Computer Fraud and Abuse Act content-scraping case, and a patent verdict for Meyer Corp. against a competitor that included a willfulness finding, trebled damages, and a full attorney’s fees award.
He has defeated preliminary injunction and temporary restraining order motions in patent, trade dress, false advertising, and trade secret disputes, and has won multiple Rule 12 motions invalidating non-practicing entities’ software patents under Alice and Section 101, with affirmances from the Federal Circuit. His matters span 3G/4G/LTE telecommunications standards, medical devices, automotive technology, software, retail, and nutraceuticals. Before joining private practice, he was a founding member of the Technology Licensing and Litigation Group at Aptiv (formerly Delphi), where he handled international IP litigation and licensing matters.

Ed Duffy, Partner | Baker Botts L.L.P

Ed Duffy is a first-chair antitrust trial lawyer and partner in Baker Botts’ Washington, D.C. office. As senior litigation counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division, he was lead trial counsel in the challenge to JetBlue Airways’ attempted acquisition of Spirit Airlines and led the government’s team through a six-week bench trial in which the court enjoined the transaction. He has tried antitrust, commercial, tort, intellectual property, environmental, and other complex cases to judgment in bench trials, jury trials, and arbitrations, and has defended judgments on appeal.

• Education & Credentials

Mr. Duffy earned his J.D., magna cum laude, from Georgetown University Law Center in 2010, where he took part in the Appellate Litigation Clinic and Moot Court, served on the Senior Board of the Georgetown Law Journal, was a Law Fellow, and was a member of the Order of the Coif. He earned his B.S.F.S. in International Politics, magna cum laude, from Georgetown University in 2007, where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He is admitted to practice in the District of Columbia, California, and Texas.

• Recognition & Leadership

At the Department of Justice, Mr. Duffy served as Acting Assistant Chief of the Antitrust Division’s Transportation, Energy & Agriculture Section, where he oversaw a team of 35 attorneys and paralegals in civil enforcement and merger review and supervised merger and conduct investigations across numerous industries. Before his government service, he spent 11 years in private practice, including as a partner at a global law firm handling antitrust litigation, civil trials, criminal investigations, and antitrust counseling.

• Professional Involvement

Mr. Duffy advises clients on antitrust liability and litigation risk across industries including airlines, financial services, power generation, oilfield services, travel management, shipping, and agriculture, and represents clients in criminal antitrust investigations. His recent thought leadership includes “Have You Tried Looking Harder? Seventh Circuit Directs Lower Courts to Go Beyond a Merits ‘Peek’ when Assessing Class Certification” (December 2025).

• Experience

Mr. Duffy’s trial work centers on U.S. v. JetBlue Airways, in which he was lead trial counsel for the Department of Justice through a six-week bench trial that ended with an injunction blocking JetBlue’s proposed acquisition of Spirit Airlines. In U.S. v. American Airlines, he cross-examined multiple experts at trial in the Department’s successful Section 1 challenge to the Northeast Alliance between American and JetBlue. In private practice, he represented the seller in FTC v. Henkel, a matter that included the first full federal court trial on the merits in an FTC action brought under Section 7.
His experience spans the full life of complex cases, from complaints and dispositive motions through fact and expert discovery, trial, and appeal. He represents generic manufacturers Sun and Taro in In re Generic Pharmaceuticals Antitrust Litigation, a landlord in In re RealPage Rental Software Antitrust Litigation, and former investors in In re Fire Apparatus Litigation. He briefed a successful motion to dismiss and appeal for a group purchasing organization in Marion Healthcare v. Becton Dickinson, represented the Department of Justice in the early phases of U.S. v. Visa, and negotiated the unwinding of interlocking directorates between several pairs of competing corporations.

SESSION 1 – Federal Bench Trials from Written Direct Testimony Through Judgment on Partial Findings | Ed Duffy & R. David Donoghue | 12:00pm – 1:00pm

This session takes jury-trained litigators on either side through the first half of a federal civil bench trial, from the trial setting through the close of evidence. It covers reading the judge’s trial order as the trial plan, choosing between live and affidavit witnesses, drafting affidavits that survive paragraph-by-paragraph objections, building proposed findings by claim element, forcing rulings on carried objections and Rule 702 challenges before the record closes, and timing a motion for judgment on partial findings under Rule 52(c). Attendees leave with an affidavit admissibility checklist and an element-by-element findings matrix.

BREAK | 1:00pm – 1:10pm

SESSION 2 – Writing Post-Trial Findings That Hold a Federal Bench Trial Judgment on Appeal | Ed Duffy & R. David Donoghue | 1:10pm – 2:10pm

This session shows federal civil trial lawyers on either side how to write post-trial findings that hold a bench trial judgment on appeal. It works through Orkin v. Albert, Urizar-Mota v. United States, and Bad River Band v. Enbridge as redlines of the findings the winning side should have proposed, covering predicate and alternative findings, lost-services arithmetic, and remedy method and equitable factors. It also covers building the record the findings cite, drafting findings the judge can sign, and closing the file with carried rulings, extra findings, and the motion to add a finding. Attendees leave with a post-trial findings audit checklist and model redlines.