Ms. Distler has more than 20 years of professional experience in consulting and uses her economic, financial, and statistical expertise in various litigation and non-litigation related matters. She is seasoned in providing expert testimony related to damages in both jury trials and arbitrations. Ms. Distler has been identified for the last nine years as a leading patent litigation expert witness in the IAM Patent 1000 – The World’s Leading Patent Professionals guide. Ms. Distler was also named to the Who’s Who Legal: Commercial Litigation Expert Witnesses for 2021 through 2023 and Who’s Who Legal: IP Experts for 2023.
Ms. Distler specializes in intellectual property disputes and management, involving patents, trademarks, copyrights, and trade secrets. In the litigation context, she has performed numerous reasonable royalty, lost profit, and disgorgement calculations and valued technology across many industries (e.g., wireless communication, smartphone, pharmaceutical/biotechnology, software, telematics, medical device, automotive and heavy equipment, consumer products, financial services, and others). Ms. Distler also has provided market research for use in licensing transactions, identifying potential infringers of technologies, and conducting royalty audits.
Her reasonable royalty assessments have included complex financial and cost analyses to derive measures of value for patented features, use of comparable licenses to determine royalty rates (including FRAND agreements in standards setting industries), and competitive market evaluations to ascertain impacts of the patented features. Ms. Distler has performed lost profits analyses addressing damage issues pertaining to price erosion, market definition and share allocation, and convoyed sales. Additionally, she has determined royalty amounts and other damages owed resulting from alleged breaches of license or settlement agreements. She has also managed large, patent enforcement actions involving multiple defendants.
Ms. Distler has worked extensively in the life sciences space. She possesses an in-depth knowledge and understanding of the pharmaceutical markets from her experience in providing liability and damage analyses related to average wholesale price and opioid litigation across multiple jurisdictions, including the roles and policies of generic and branded developers, manufacturers, wholesalers, pharmacies, and third-party payors. Ms. Distler has provided expert opinions related to damages and secondary considerations of non-obviousness for pharmaceuticals, biopharmaceuticals, and medical devices. Her damages opinions have included both lost profits and reasonable royalties. She has analyzed pre-clinical, clinical, and approved therapies for treating cancers, neurodegenerative diseases, and other diseases. In the medical device area, Ms. Distler has worked for the leading medical device companies for products in the endovascular, orthopedic, cardiac, and ophthalmic spaces. She has also valued technology for licensing and venture capital raising purposes.
In addition to her intellectual property expertise, Ms. Distler has also worked on forensic investigations, business valuations, shareholder disputes, wrongful terminations, and other labor-related matters, econometric and statistical cases, and other general commercial litigation matters.