After the Main Event

• Author: Ronald K. Fierstein
• Profession: Lawyer on the team of litigators from the prestigious patent law firm of Fish & Neave
• Pages: 389-402

389

CHAPTER 22

AFTER THE MAIN EVENT

With Herb Schwartz now at the reins of the Polaroid trial team, Polaroid’s

obligatory technical case was presented, but always with a focus on tell-

ing the real-life story of the making of the inventions at issue, and the his-

tory between the two companies that had led to this litigation. Schwartz

knew that virtually any patent, dissected and analyzed in isolation, would

have warts and blemishes exposed that might serve to undermine it. By

forcing the judge to consider each patent within the framework of actual

events as they took place, taking as much hindsight and assumption as

possible out of the analysis, he believed he was creating the best possible

environment for the judge to conduct the technical analysis of the patents

required to adjudicate the case.

The next witness for Polaroid was Robert Duncan. Land had hired

Duncan in September 1968 to serve as the program manager for the

SX-70 camera and film system then secretly under development. As Dun-

can described it, the project at that time included only “a small group of

engineering personnel sequestered from the rest of the company.”1 The

group had built a series of prototype cameras, but a full year later, in the

fall of 1969, they were still experiencing problems with the latest model,

particularly its film transport and processing system.

The pressure was on because at that time, Land was already eager to

go public with the new system, something he would now be restrained

from doing until Polaroid’s 1970 shareholders meeting. Duncan was con-

cerned: “my view was that we had so many problems and the rate of prog-

ress that we were making in solving these problems was such that we

were not going to meet the scheduled introduction date of the system.”

Duncan told the court that he brought his concerns directly to Land, who

promptly created a special group of researchers to address these problems.

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