rlstone@hhlaw.com
PHONE
+1.310.785.4668
FAX
+1.310.785.4601
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Richard
L.
Stone
Partner,
Los Angeles
Richard Stone's business litigation practice focuses on two main areas. One area concentrates on matters involving unfair competition, trade secret, trademark, copyright, and securities disputes, for which Richard represents Fortune 100 and smaller businesses engaged in the communications, Internet, entertainment, finance, high technology, transportation, and retail industries, among others. The second area involves corporate director and officer cases, shareholder derivative suits, securities and class action cases, fraud, and related business tort matters.
Richard's experience extends to the representation of clients in court-annexed and private arbitrations and in other alternative dispute resolution processes. While always aggressively pursuing clients’ contractual and legal rights, Richard is alert to clients' interests in diminishing the expense and distraction that litigation may impose. Accordingly, he works with clients both to maximize their litigation posture and to explore alternative solutions to legal problems.
Representative Experience
In May 2008 a federal jury has largely cleared firm client News Corporation’s NDS Group companies (NDS) in a piracy lawsuit brought by DISH Network (formerly Echostar). After a five-week trial in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, jurors, after six hours of deliberations, ruled in favor of satellite television technology company NDS on the majority of the charges brought in the suit by DISH. In denying many of the claims, the jury awarded actual damages of $45.69 or, in statutory damages, of $1,000, relating to a single incident involving a test card used by NDS. The plaintiffs had requested statutory damages of $1.6 billion dollars during closing arguments to the jury.
In July 2007 Richard secured an antitrust victory for firm client MySpace, Inc. in the first antitrust case ever to address whether a social networking Web site can prevent its users from posting links to competitors' Web pages on its Web site. The Honorable A. Howard Matz, U.S. District Court Judge in the Central District of California, dismissed the antitrust claims with prejudice. In his decision, the judge ruled that excluding a competitor's Web page links from MySpace.com is not anticompetitive and did not cause antitrust injury, and found that MySpace had no duty to promote its competitors' Web sites by displaying active links to those sites.
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