Ramey’s Proxy Patent Tactics Put Local Attorneys in Jeopardy

Susan Kalra’s 30-year career in law was in peril.

A federal judge’s sanction order to self-report violations to the state bar forced her to resign from her job. She had to plead for a payment plan to cover her share of a $64,000 sanction fine.

Meanwhile, the attorney who hired her as his California counsel for the case that got her sanctioned, Bill Ramey, remains one of the country’s most prolific filers of patent infringement lawsuits even as courts have sanctioned his firm and/or his clients at least 23 times.

Kalra is one of at least three attorneys facing career or reputational damage after agreeing to work for or with Ramey in jurisdictions where he can’t litigate without the court’s permission. Although judges have concluded Ramey controls most litigation from behind the scenes, they have so far been unsympathetic to the local counsel.

Kalra declined multiple phone and email requests for interviews.

William “Bill” P. Ramey III and Susan Kalra enter the San Francisco federal court on Sept. 19, 2024, to face a sanctions hearing over his practice’s patent litigation in California.

Photographer: Loren Elliott/Bloomberg

“The adage ‘if you lie down with dogs, you can expect to wake up with fleas’ rings true here,” Florida Magistrate Judge Enjoliqué Lett said in a filing when recommending sanctions against a local attorney for working with Ramey while he was “operating behind the scenes and driving the process.”

Ramey’s history includes violations of court rules and processes. But jurisdictional rules often limit courts’ ability to punish Ramey when he’s not admitted to practice in a district, exposing local attorneys to punitive judgments.

Ramey’s proxies have risked fines and credibility in court, a cautionary tale for attorneys working with out-of-district firms. Although representing clients across the country can provide valuable and lucrative work experience, courts are starting to sanction Ramey and his local counsel.

Judges in some of the cases involving Ramey’s local counsel have noted that lawyers are responsible for their conduct and work-product on cases where they are the named counsel, pointing to attorney conduct rules which state that attorneys signing submitted filings are the ones responsible for its contents, regardless of who drafted them.

“Attorneys can sometimes get very comfortable with that relationship and can sometimes be taken aback when something goes wrong,” Cassandra Burke Robertson, a professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law.

Unhealthy Relationship

Because Ramey is so prolific, filing about 260 lawsuits last year in at least 12 courts with only five lawyers on his staff, he relies on local attorneys in jurisdictions where he’s not licensed.

That’s not uncommon, he notes.

“When we work in any other state, we work with a licensed attorney in that state,” Ramey said in a previous interview; he didn’t respond to multiple interview requests for this story.

Ramey, a registered patent attorney licensed in Texas and Utah, has admissions in various federal courts across the country. “They’re the ones that represent the client in court and we provide support to that attorney,” he told Bloomberg Law in November 2024.

But courts have probed Ramey’s leadership in those cases. At least one local proxy told a judge the arrangement was problematic.

Jimmy Chong, who began working with Ramey in 2021 on cases in Delaware’s busy patent court, alleges their relationship deteriorated as Ramey’s office sent “very aggressive and negative emails” about a case they were working on for a shared client.

Chong, in a court hearing, told the judge that Ramey berated him and treated him like a paralegal, tasking him with fixing draft filings with flawed signature lines, spelling errors and case numbers. Chong said he never even met the client, who primarily spoke with Ramey.

Ramey was not present at the hearing, and declined multiple Bloomberg Law requests for comment on the details of this article, including questions about Chong’s claims.

“I don’t want to expose my staff to that type of working relationship,” Chong said during a court hearing called when he sought to withdraw as local counsel for Ramey’s clients. “I don’t think it is a healthy relationship.”

Ramey and Chong agreed in multiple engagement letters, submitted as exhibits, that the Texas attorney would be responsible for drafting documents while local counsel handled filing with the court. The duo also agreed that Chong wouldn’t be required to file any claims for Ramey’s clients if he deemed them unethical, impractical, or not legally justifiable.

US District Judge Colm Connolly, in Delaware, found at least nine cases in which Ramey and Chong didn’t comply with court rules. (He also referred Chong to the district’s disciplinary committee for possible sanctions in cases not connected to his partnership with Ramey.) Chong didn’t respond to multiple interview requests.

Coast to Coast

Florida lawyer Victoria Brieant also landed in hot water after working with Ramey for at least five years. Only state bar members can practice in Florida courts without special admission Ramey didn’t have.

The court sanctioned Brieant over an infringement case she filed over an electronic banking technology patent, even though the Patent Trial and Appeal Board had largely invalidated the asserted patent claims months earlier.

Judge Robert N. Scola Jr. of the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida rejected the complaint as a “shotgun pleading” and the bank  demanded attorney’s fees, characterizing the case as a “paradigm of abusive patent litigation.”

The judge ordered Brieant, already sanctioned in a separate matter not involving Ramey, to cover a share of at least $84,600 of the bank’s attorney fees. Ramey faced no consequences—and is now representing Brieant on appeal. Brieant didn’t respond to interview requests.

Jennifer Ishimoto received only a warning over her work as local counsel for Ramey in California. Ishimoto, who declined to comment for this story, is now representing multiple Ramey clients, according to court records.

Magistrate Judge Virginia DeMarchi rebuked Ishimoto, who has 25 years of experience in IP law, for filing documents drafted by Ramey and his law firm that contained false statements.

“Taking into account the context in which these filings occurred—when Ramey was already facing scrutiny and significant sanctions for his conduct related to pro hac vice appearances in this district—his submission of false statements in this case suggests at the very least gross negligence or recklessness in his supervision,” DeMarchi said.

Ramey oversaw another case with Ishimoto against Salesforce Inc. in the Northern District of California without the court’s permission. Salesforce argued in August the duo allowed their client Vilox Technologies LLC to turn the litigation “into a shell game” by moving patent rights between entities and executives, and filing allegations without standing.

The software giant pushed for sanctions against both attorneys, arguing Ishimoto aided the bad behavior by filing documents with the court that “falsely suggested” Ramey received permission to manage the case in California. The motion is pending, and Ishimoto withdrew as Vilox’s counsel.

Ramey and Ishimoto denied handling the case in bad faith in a September filing, arguing there was no confusion with who owned the asserted patents. Ishimoto said her role in the case was solely as local counsel after Kalra stopped working with Ramey, according to an accompanying declaration.

Ishimoto accepted that she could have investigated possible mistakes in filings, but any errors were “inadvertent,” she said.
“The bottom line is that everyone in this case, including the Court, treated Mr. Ramey and his firm as counsel of record,” Ishimoto said.

Ramey said in a September declaration his name was on each document because the case originated in Texas, before being transferred to California.

Star Chamber

Kalra began working with Ramey’s firm as early as November 2019 as a local counsel, then joined him as an employee in February 2023. By mid-2023, Kalra had her first rebuke by a California federal judge.

Judge Vince Chhabria admonished her during a July 2023 hearing in EscapeX IP LLC’s case against Google LLC, “You filed a frivolous infringement lawsuit, and you didn’t investigate it, and you didn’t think about it.”

Kalra argued the suit had been filed before she joined Ramey’s firm. But the judge said Kalra had her chances to bring up concerns about conduct of the litigation and didn’t. The judge ordered EscapeX to pay Google more than $191,000 in legal fees, and later added $63,500 in sanctions against Kalra and Ramey for filing a motion for new evidence that wasn’t new.

The sanctions are under appeal.

In another case, Magistrate Judge Peter Kang in San Francisco ordered sanctions on both Kalra and Ramey.

Kalra admitted to Kang that she allowed Ramey and one of his colleagues to work on her cases and sign filings as she dealt with stress-related health issues.

“I relied on the highly competent Partners at the Ramey LLP firm to work on cases and court filings including claim charts, and I utilized the firm’s staff to assist with filings,” Kalra said in the declaration. “I reviewed documents including complaints and memoranda before they were filed.”

The judge ordered Kalra to pay over $8,000 in fees, take continuing legal education courses and self-report the sanctions. She also alerted the California state bar, and federal court disciplinary committees, according to a notice.

In the same case, Kang later questioned Kalra after she submitted a filing that accused the judge of operating his court “like a star chamber.” Under questioning by the magistrate judge, Ramey was the only attorney who agreed with the choice of wording, though he contended he wasn’t literally saying the court fit that description.

And after at least a four month-long search, she recently landed a job as an employment attorney with Michael Sullivan & Associates LLP.

But the sanctions could trigger a disciplinary probe that might suspend her law license, said David Carr, a 12-year veteran of the California State Bar including as assistant chief trial counsel.

“I think there is a high likelihood that Ms. Kalra will face professional discipline in California,” Carr alleges. “The wind is going to be at the back of the prosecution here.”

Kalra declined to comment on possible prosecution.

Near the end of the April hearing, Kalra approached Kang explaining her struggle to find work. She explained Murphy Austin Adams Schoenfeld LLP in Sacramento pressured her to resign because of the sanctions, while another firm cited the order during a job interview.

“I hear you Ms. Kalra,” Kang said during the hearing. The sanctions stood.