Litigation-Grade Translation Secures Patent Lawsuit Victory

When a UK tech company faced a patent lawsuit, law firm Nexus Legal & IP built its defence on obscure Japanese technical papers. Our dual-expertise team provided a court-admissible translation that proved prior art, invalidated the competitor’s patent, and won the case.

Client: Nexus Legal and IP

Industry: Intellectual Property Law

Services Provided: Specialist Technical Translation (Japanese to English), Certified Translation for Court, Subject-Matter Expert Validation

The Case Study Covers

• The immense challenge of translating foreign-language evidence for patent litigation.
• The ‘Tandem Expert’ solution is used to ensure total technical and legal accuracy.
• How a translation directly led to winning a multi-million-pound lawsuit.

“The evidence they produced was watertight and became the cornerstone of our victory. Their team’s technical expertise was matched only by their understanding of legal requirements.” – Lead Patent Attorney, Nexus Legal & IP.

Client Background

Nexus Legal & IP is a premier law firm defending UK innovators in intellectual property disputes.

Their client was unfairly accused of infringing a patent for semiconductor technology, threatening their core business.

The firm’s winning strategy depended on finding “prior art,” and they located it in a set of highly technical academic papers published only in Japanese.

Challenges

• The translation had to be accurate enough to be submitted as evidence in the UK High Court.
• It required an expert-level understanding of both semiconductor physics and patent law.
• The goal was to prove that the concepts in the Japanese text were identical to the competitor’s patent claims.
• The evidence had to be delivered and certified within a strict court-mandated deadline.

Solutions

• Assigned a ‘Tandem Expert’ team: a PhD-level technical translator and a senior legal linguist.
• Maintained a collaborative review process with the attorneys at Nexus Legal & IP.
• Produced a side-by-side bilingual evidence matrix for maximum clarity in court.
• Delivered a fully certified translation with a formal Statement of Truth, ready for litigation.

Results

Our certified translation was accepted by the court as irrefutable evidence of prior art. This directly led to the invalidation of the plaintiff’s central patent claims and the complete withdrawal of the lawsuit. Nexus Legal & IP’s client was saved from immense financial risk, and the law firm lauded our critical contribution to their litigation success, retaining us for all future technically complex legal translation needs.