Patent litigation a full-contact sport for Montreal’s Fieldturf
The artificial turf business has low barriers to entry and the concept seems fairly simple. After all, synthetic grass is really just a special kind of outdoor, all-weather rug.
At least that’s what you might conclude if you’re merely watching from the sidelines. But it turns out the business requires a fair bit of innovation to stay on top and is every bit as tough as some of the fullcontact sports played on those artificial fields.
Aside from the battle for customers, it’s a world of hotly contested lawsuits that can drag on for years. These turf wars are disputes over patents, the legal recipe for the materials and design that synthetic grass companies put into their systems.
If you want to play in the turf business, as Marie-France Nantel, the top in-house lawyer with a Montrealbased synthetic grass company called Fieldturf Inc. is finding out, you’ll have to suit up and get ready for court.
Nantel joined the company in 2010 after working as an M&A lawyer at private law firms in Montreal. She’d never been a courtroom lawyer, and was amazed at the amount of litigation she soon encountered in the synthetic grass business.
“Frankly, I could not imagine how belligerent it was going to be,” Nantel said. “The whole industry is like this, not only in the U.S., but also in Europe. People sue each other. It’s very aggressive.”
The market for synthetic turf is believed to be at least US$500 million annually and growing at a rate of more than 10 per cent a year.
Fieldturf, a subsidiary of Francebased global flooring company Tarkett Group, has developed a recipe for synthetic grass systems that is so good that it has a U.S. patent for it. When it thinks rivals are improperly infringing its patent, Fieldturf sues.
Last year, Fieldturf won a US$30-million jury award after a five-year legal battle in a U.S. federal patent lawsuit argued in Detroit. The judge later declared that defendant AstroTurf LLC had wilfully infringed FieldTurf’s patent, entitling the Canadian company to triple the jury award to $90 million. That lawsuit has since been stayed, because AstroTurf filed for U.S. Chapter 11 creditor protection in late June.
Patent lawsuits such as these are simply a fact of life in the synthetic turf business.
“You want people to respect your patent because that’s what we’re selling. There are multiple elements to a sale, and price is only one, Nantel said.