Jaime Cardenas-Navia Honored among Law360's 2024 Rising Stars for Trials

Jaime Cardenas-Navia, a partner at RJLF, has been honored as one of Law360’s 2024 Rising Stars in trials. Among only five lawyers recognized in the trials category, this accolade celebrates legal professionals under 40 whose remarkable achievements transcend their age.

As a seasoned trial attorney, Cardenas-Navia specializes in high-stakes patent infringement disputes. His litigation expertise extends to representing and challenging Fortune 500 companies in cases involving multimillion-dollar stakes across diverse technologies such as video streaming, cloud computing, solar panels, and consumer electronics like smartphones, tablets, cameras, printers, and scanners. Notably, Cardenas-Navia recently played a pivotal role in securing a landmark $525 million patent infringement jury verdict for tech startup Kove, which contributed to his recognition by Law360.

Law360 evaluated over 1,200 submissions from 70 law firms across 34 practice areas to identify winners based on their outstanding career accomplishments within their respective legal disciplines.

Read the full list of honorees here (subscriber access only) and Jaime’s interview below.

Law360 Interview with Jaime Cardenas-Navia

His biggest case:

The biggest case of Cardenas-Navia's career was the trial he had in April where he was part of the legal team representing Kove IO Inc. in a patent infringement suit against Amazon Web Services Inc.

In April, a federal jury found that Amazon infringed three of Kove's patents relating to cloud data storage technology, and while the jury found the infringement was not willful, Amazon was hit with $525 million in damages.

Practically everything about the case was challenging, Cardenas-Navia told Law360.

"We litigated for 5½ years just to get to trial, and the trial itself was eight days and a lot of ups and downs," he said. "I think part of what made it challenging was the technology. It's the core of what goes to Amazon Web Services."

Former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was personally involved in the case, as was Andy Jassy, the current CEO, Cardenas-Navia said. He said it was fun that the team got to take Jassy's deposition.

Part of the reason the case took so long was because of COVID-19, and discovery disputes got dragged out, Cardenas-Navia said. Another reason was the high profile of both the case and product.

"We had to file two motions to get Andy Jassy's deposition, then there was a lot of other motion practice to get what were some older and highly sensitive documents," Cardenas-Navia said. "That was a bit out of the ordinary."

His most interesting case:

Kove's case against AWS was also Cardenas-Navia's most interesting for a lot of the same reasons.

All trials are fast-changing, but his team especially had to adjust on the fly because of how Amazon's counsel put on their case, he said.

"An interesting approach I hadn't seen before where they essentially don't use any slides," Cardenas-Navia said. "Anything they wanted to show the jury, it's either an exhibit, they used a small handful of those, or what they would do a lot is just draw on an iPad."

Because of the lack of slides, Cardenas-Navia said the legal team was in the dark about what Amazon's witnesses were going to talk about. Throughout the whole trial, he said Amazon had made a dozen or so slides.

"It was funny ... they sent us their slides in advance of opening statements," Cardenas-Navia said. "We were surprised by the slides. A lot of them seemed designed to entice objections. We limit our objections, we made them very minimal, and then of course their lead counsel gets up and doesn't use a single slide."

Why he's a trial attorney:

Cardenas-Navia said that when he was a first-year associate, he was fortunate to attend two week-long trials back to back in the district of Delaware where he got to see a lot of strong trial attorneys early on. After that, he was hooked.

"When you're in court and when you're at trial, you're trying to put together your narrative and do whatever you can to persuade the jury to see things the way you believe they should be seen using a mix of logic, emotion, common sense, showmanship, whatever it takes to just try to get them to see it from a certain perspective," Cardenas-Navia said.

He said he finds that skill set fascinating and incredibly rewarding for that moment where the jurors can be seen nodding along and you can sense the jury is having that "a-ha" moment.

Other notable cases:

Cardenas-Navia was part of the legal team representing tech start-up Droplets, which he said developed technology that makes web pages dynamic, in a suit against Yahoo.

After a three-week trial, a California federal jury found in March 2022 that Yahoo owed Droplets $15 million. The firm then won its post-trial bid for pre- and post-judgment interest, bringing the total award to more than $27 million.

Cardenas-Navia is also representing VideoLabs Inc. in a series of cases. He worked on a case against Amazon in 2022, where VideoLabs sued Amazon, accusing it of infringing three of its video technology patents that were developed by engineers at Panasonic.

VideoLabs sued in the Western District of Texas, but Amazon wanted the case transferred to the Western District of Washington, where it is headquartered. U.S. District Judge Alan D. Albright granted the motion in October 2022, but VideoLabs quickly filed a motion asking him to reconsider.

Cardenas-Navia said there was a separate motion that they thought should have been decided before the motion transfer because they thought it actually could resolve the motion transfer in their favor.

But because the case had already effectively transferred to Seattle, Judge Albright had to ask U.S. District Judge James L. Robart to pass the case back so he could make a decision. Judge Robart agreed.

Not long after, the parties told Judge Albright they had reached an agreement in principle.

How the legal industry will change over the next 10 years:

There's been some progress on more federal judges being appointed, Cardenas-Navia said, and he hopes that continues.

"People never really want to end up in litigation, but if they do, hopefully it's resolved relatively quickly and doesn't need to drag on for five, six, seven years," he said. "The judges are really trying, but their dockets are huge. So hopefully more judges will help that and that'll really help resolve disputes more quickly and more equitably."