By DeForest McDuff and Daryl Fairweather

In valuation and reasonable royalty analysis, economic experts often seek to measure the contribution of a technology to a particular product sold in the marketplace. In recent years, courts have instructed experts to apportion royalties and economic damages to the value contributed by a patented feature relative to non-patented features.1 While this instruction is straightforward in theory, experts are often left with the challenging task of reliably quantifying an apportionment for a specific feature within a complex product.