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Darth's January testimony had raised some questions about our technical defense
against Better Supplies. Since Ravi's deposition never materialized and my testimony had been postponed until late March, it gave me time to do some work on the technical issues which were still no solidified. Two prominent issues had surfaced.

First, in one of the Better Supplies' patents involved in the litigation, there was an example of a phenolic resin which was made by a process very similar to the one Gamma Supplies was now using and it was possible that the material itself was very similar. We had to establish that the material in Better Supplies' Example 12 of the patent did not work as well as our material. Example 12, as we referred
to it, would become more and more critical to the Gamma's case as time went on. The second problem was a result of a statement Darth made during his depostion. He had claimed that in early 1976, one batch of phenolic resin had worked exceptionally well and he thought it might have been accidentally the same as the phenolic resin I had subsequently developed. Although this had little effect on the immediate litigation, it meant that I had to get a patent application filed as soon as possible. I also started working on the that application immediately.

The easiest way to remove the concern about Example 12 was to reproduce the work
that Better Supplies had reported. This required that I go back into the laboratory, make the phenolic resin as described in the patent and then evaluate it. I was not looking forward to going back into the laboratory. First, Buzz was always giving me a difficult time over one thing or another, and John and Jeff contributed to a hostile environment. In addition to the difficulties with Buzz, my perceived conflict with Jim hadnot subsided. This fact was reinforced by Jay Wells who informed me that John had made the remark, “Russ is going to pay for Ravi being fired”. And my situation was not helped by the fact that Ravi still came in and used his office from time to time and always held visible conference with John. The high visibility of all of the hostility made me wonder why no one seemed to care about the situation. Despite all of the distractions, I still managed to work on Example 12.

I was concerned about Example 12, because from what I knew about the chemistry
involved, I could not see why the phenolic resin described should not work. John had informed me he had tried to make Example 12 work, but was not successful. Since I was aware of Joohn's propensity to massage and slant data, I was still uneasy about the material in Example 12. Still, there were some differences between the material in Example 12 and the phenolic resin I had developed. I spent several weeks carefully following Better Supplies' directions, but I could not get the critical final results which they had reported. In essence, Example 12 did not work as reported. I was relieved and not totally surprised since patents will frequently contain fictitious examples just to cover and protect against all possibilities.
Since Example 12 was one of only two of its kind in the Better Supplies patents under question, I believed that this might be the case here.

By now I was fully convinced that my only purpose at Gamma Supplies was to provide a technical base and testimony to defeat the Better Supplies' patents. I decided to push for as many concessions as I could get before my scheduled testimony. The first thing I wanted to do was to add a new person in the laboratory to break up the John, Buzz, Jeff cabal and to upgrade the technical abilities in the laboratory. To that end, I requested that I attend the ACS meeting in March and recruit a new chemist since I was suppose to be “building a laboratory".