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Component Manufacturing dverti$ dverti $ er
Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
April 2023 #15285 Page #10
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The Development of the Truss Plate, Part IX: The Case of the Century By Joe Kannapell
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mong our industry’s unsung heroes, Walter Moehlenpah takes a close second place behind Cal Jureit. Both built pivotal, pioneering businesses, Jureit through his truss plate and Moehlenpah through his truss machine. Yet Jureit was bound to have the upper hand, as he was the truss plate’s inventor and owner of the patent, and he had already put together a nationwide franchise and had won lawsuits against Bill Black’s truss plate twice. Now Moehlenpah had the audacity to challenge Jureit with a very similar plate, and the outcome of this challenge would change the landscape of the truss industry permanently. Moehlenpah was as fine a mechanical engineer as Jureit was a structural engineer, but most crucially, he attracted some of the finest talent. One of the first was a McDonnell Aircraft engineer, George Pallme, who designed the most prolific truss machine, the Mono Press, with the skills he had honed working on the most prolific fighter-bomber, the F-4 Phantom. Not long after, Moehlenpah hired William Webster as his attorney, who would later serve as Director of both the FBI and the CIA. Recently, Director Webster recounted his fond memories of working with Moehlenpah in the days before his ascent to the highest ranks in government. But Moehlenpah’s most consequential hire was Stuart Senniger, his patent attorney and ultimate defense counsel. Senniger was a Principal of a St. Louis specialty firm, Senniger, Powers and Leavitt, and was a celebrated patent litigator. In August 1960, Moehlenpah applied for a patent on a connector similar to the Atkins plate and began marketing it. (For details on the Atkins plate, see The Development of the Truss Plate, Part VIII: Patent Skirmishes.) By May 1961, Jureit became aware of this and brought suit. Because patent law derives from a federal statute, infringement claims are adjudicated in the federal court with jurisdiction over the location of the alleged offense. In the present case, the District Court in the Eastern District of Missouri would hear the case in St. Louis, about 4 miles from Hydro-Air’s headquarters. Coincidentally, a few years later, William Webster would preside over this court. Jureit was represented by two eminently qualified firms with distinguished principals. His counsel in drafting the patent and litigating it was D.C.-based Robert E. LeBlanc, who was said to be one of the top litigation patent attorneys in the United States. His local counsel was Kingsland et. al., whose senior partner had served as the head of the U.S. Patent Office. Each of these participating attorneys was registered with the U.S. Patent Office as having demonstrated their Continued next page
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