The famous Lucas gusher erupted on Spindletop Hill in 1901 near Beaumont, sparking an oil exploration boom that brought notoriety, economic development, tremendous wealth and a surge of wildcatters and oil speculators to this small Southeast Texas town. In the last decade, Marshall, Texas has experienced a different kind of economic boom that is also bringing tremendous wealth, a flood of lawyers and significant notoriety in the form of patent litigation to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. One of the first attorneys to take advantage of the continuing wave of intellectual property litigation was Carl Roth ’61, a Port Arthur native.
“Highway 69 was still a two-lane highway to Port Arthur with one blinking traffic light at SH 365 to Nederland. You could catch a ride to Lamar in less than five minutes because of all the refinery workers going to Beaumont,” Roth said. “Back then, you didn’t have to worry too much about who was picking you up.”
At that time, students could get academic advisement during registration by any faculty member who had a free chair. His first semester, Roth just happened to find an unoccupied seat with Irving Dawson, the chair of the government department, even though he was a mechanical engineering major. He credits Dawson for allowing him to take course overloads each semester to earn a bachelor’s degree in only three years. Eventually Dawson, and instructors like Ralph Wooster, wooed him away from engineering to the liberal arts school where he earned a political science degree.
At the suggestion of Dawson, Roth enrolled in law school at the University of Texas, even though he had no real desire to become a lawyer. Although he never pictured himself practicing law, Austin was an exciting place to be in the early ’60s, Roth recalls. Then, in late November, one of his law professors recommended he interview with U.S. District Judge Joe Sheehy in Tyler for a position as his briefing attorney or “law clerk.” Most federal judges have two law clerks, who normally serve two-year terms.
“I visited with Judge Sheehy on a Saturday, and he told me to come to work on Monday,” Roth said with a smile. “He told me right up front he didn’t like law clerks, had never had a law clerk and didn’t need a snotty-nosed kid right out of law school telling him the law.”
It was during this time Roth found out he wanted to become a trial lawyer. Watching high-powered lawyers battle each other in the courtroom day after day, he began to think, “Is this what lawyers do? This looks like fun. My competitive instincts started to kick in, along with my ego, and I started to think to myself, ‘these guys are supposed to be the big guns, but I think I could do better. I think I could beat these guys.’” Roth found more than a career in Tyler. He met and married Jo Ann Ford, the daughter of rose growers, to whom he has been married for 39 years.
U.S. Attorney William Wayne Justice, whom he had met while working for Sheehy, offered Roth a position as assistant U.S. attorney in Beaumont, a position he held nearly two years when he received another call from Justice, who by this time had been appointed to the federal judgeship in Tyler. He recommended Roth to a law firm in Marshall and convinced him to go for an interview. He joined the law firm of Jones, Jones and Baldwin in 1969, trying hundreds of cases over the next three decades. He was involved in one of the first asbestos cases in the country in the mid-’70s, resulting in a $20-million settlement that unleashed a flood of asbestos related litigation.
In 1991, a classmate from law school gave him the opportunity to represent Monsanto in a claim that resulted in a $71 million verdict for the company. Shortly thereafter, a friend at Baker Botts L.L.P., an international law firm with a worldwide network of offices, retained him as cocounsel in a trade secret case brought by a Dallas telecommunications company, Digital Switch, against Motorola. Digital Switch needed a quick resolution to survive and Marshall’s federal court worked quickly. The suit was favorably resolved in only four months, and a reputation for quickly disposing of patent litigation was born in Marshall. Shortly thereafter Roth left the Jones firm to establish the Roth Law Firm.
The first company to take advantage of the “rocket docket” was Dallas-based Texas Instruments. “They were accustomed to a patent infringement case taking two to three years to get to trial and promised me a substantial bonus if we could get the case tried within 12 months,” Roth said. “The case was over in 10 months.”
TI has more than 5,000 patents, and has traditionally been very aggressive in enforcing its patents against other semiconductor competitors. Roth has represented TI in more than two dozen cases in the Marshall federal court. In 1999, TI won a $25 million verdict that would have precluded Hyundai Electronics, the defendant, from selling their memory chip products in the United States. Hyundai agreed to pay TI $1 billion in royalties over the next 10 years. Since then, the Marshall federal court has become the hottest patent docket in the country, with virtually every major corporation in the world following TI’s lead by filing their patent disputes in Marshall.
Patent lawyers can file suits in any federal court in the United States. Marshall has become a popular place to file patent litigation because there is little interruption to the patent litigation docket from competing criminal cases. In other district courts, the defendant’s right to a speedy trial in a criminal case can delay a patent suit for as long as three to four years. The Marshall federal court can bring a patent suit to trial in as few as 15 months, which, some would argue, puts increased pressure on the defendants to settle quickly. The explosion of the patent docket in Marshall coincides with the 1999 appointment of Judge T. John Ward as the resident judge. Ward, who coincidentally was the opposing counsel in the TI v. Hyundai case, is known as a no-nonsense judge who has mapped out procedural rules to govern patent trials so they move forward more quickly and efficiently.
To date, the Roth firm has settled or won judgments totaling more than $2.4 billion for TI and is routinely retained by law firms from around the world as local counsel, and on many occasions as lead counsel.
“These law firms want someone who is in that courtroom every week,” said Roth. “They want someone who knows how the judge operates, knows the local rules and customs, and, most of all, can communicate with local juries.”
Roth is quick to convey that his passion is still being in the courtroom arguing a case. He brushes aside any notions of retirement, saying he’s too old now to be doing all the things he said he wanted to do when he retired. “I still enjoy the adrenalin rush of standing in front of a jury,” he said. “I now regard most of those things I said I’d do as just being painful.”
Roth is the first to admit that most of his career happened because he was in the right place at the right time, but he made the most of the opportunities that arose in life. He never intended to graduate from Lamar with a liberal arts degree and never dreamed of being a lawyer. He never expected to work for a judge, and never expected to live and practice law in a small town in East Texas. And, he certainly never expected to be trying complex patent cases at this stage of his career.
“How did all this happen to a guy who entered Lamar thinking he’d be an engineer, and went to law school just to stay out of the army?” Roth wonders. “I certainly can’t claim that any success I’ve enjoyed was due to an elaborate plan or design on my part.”
With all its unintended twists and turns, however, Roth says, “I’m proud to be an alumnus of Lamar. I enjoyed my time there, and it was a period of intellectual awakening for me.”
Roth still enjoys living in Marshall with Jo Ann and spending time with their three grandchildren. They have three children; Brendan, who is an attorney at the Roth Law Firm; a younger son, Dylan, who is the videographer for the law firm; and a daughter, Melinda, who goes by the name “Indy” and works in Austin at a residential treatment center for abused girls.
