Securus Challenges Global Tel Link (GTL) to Patent Portfolio Bake Off Again

DALLAS, March 23, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Securus Technologies, a leading provider of civil and criminal justice technology solutions for public safety, investigation, corrections and monitoring announced today that it has offered a challenge to its main competitor GTL to have an independent patent judge who has the expertise to examine both of our respective patent portfolios and determine who has the largest and most valuable United States patent portfolio. 

"GTL has used litigation and 'spun facts' to try to say that their patents are comparable to ours," said Richard A. ("Rick") Smith, Chief Executive Officer at Securus Technologies. "So – I want an independent judge to evaluate both patent portfolios – it isn't a fair comparison to GTL because of the respective size of our patent portfolios and what we have invested here at Securus in the last five (5) years. We have invested over $700 million back in our business including the acquisition of companies, technologies, and product development along with a state of the art Technology Center and US Customer Service Center, and GTL has invested less than 10% of what we have on a comparable basis. We put our money where our mouth is for sure."

On March 22, 2017, GTL issued a press release entitled "GTL Countersues Securus for Patent Infringement" – this is old news and includes many factual errors. We will issue a Press Release later today that corrects their misinformation.

"GTL is at their campaign of misinformation again. We recently won three (3) large contracts from them for over $20 million annually of revenue, and they just don't know what to do. We believe GTL is taking this tact of discussing patent infringement and misrepresenting the status of such cases because they want to shift focus from the Attorney General of Mississippi lawsuit against them wherein the Mississippi Attorney General indicated that "GTL knowingly and intentionally conspired to devise schemes such as bribery, kickbacks, unfair and deceptive trade practices, misrepresentations, fraud, concealment, money laundering, fraudulent use of "sole source" contracts when competitive bidding was required and other wrongful conduct, all with the intended purpose, and effect, of defrauding the State of at least $6,000,000." In addition to the foregoing, the Mississippi Attorney General also brought claims against GTL for "a pattern of racketeering activity", "violations of the Mississippi Antitrust Act", "breach of fiduciary duty", "common law fraud", and "civil conspiracy". This is clearly not good for them – so they can't discuss the elephant in the room – lack of integrity," said Smith.

"We know GTL's technology platforms because we used to use older, less efficient, less feature-rich, primarily premise-based systems, not fully centralized processing and storage systems, and have these comments when comparing the two (2) platforms:

• Securus owns a larger product set of useful services for the corrections sector;
• Securus has its own domestic based call center staffed by Securus employees – GTL previously indicated that it outsources a significant part of its customer service. Our testing has indicated that Securus has call answer performance significantly better than GTL's;
• Securus uses its own trained field technicians versus GTL contracting most of that work out to non-employees who do not have the same vested interest in serving customers well;
• Securus has created the largest Voice Over Internet Protocol Corrections calling platform in the world. This VOIP Platform provides facility customers with routine software upgrades that enable new products/services to be seamlessly distributed to customers at a lower cost and much quicker versus GTL's premise-based older platforms;
• Of the former GTL facility customers that have converted to Securus – many have indicated that Securus' technology and customer service is superior to that offered by GTL. This is straight from customers who have direct knowledge of both."

"We issued a formal 'Patent Portfolio Bake Off' Challenge to GTL that went unanswered so we did something that was even better, I believe," said Smith.

"We used our outside counsel to engage three (3) independent, well-known, intellectual property consulting firms to compare and contrast our patent portfolio with GTL's patent portfolio. Outside counsel did not disclose who their client was, so the comparison was independent, intellectually honest, and non-biased," said Smith. "Counsel didn't even tell the consulting firms what the list of patents was for each company. Securus didn't provide any help or assistance to aid their analysis at all."

The key findings of the studies are provided below:

"The three (3) independent patent portfolio analyses clearly show that by virtually any qualitative or quantitative measurement, Securus' patent portfolio is much stronger, broader, and valuable than the other company's portfolio," Smith said.

"We did this work, spent this time, and paid a significant amount of money to make clear to everyone that you can use the legal system to cloud facts for a while, but the truth on the superior numbers and value of our patent portfolio will eventually prevail," concluded Smith.

ABOUT SECURUS TECHNOLOGIES
Headquartered in Dallas, Texas, and serving more than 3,450 public safety, law enforcement and corrections agencies and over 1,200,000 inmates across North America, Securus Technologies is committed to serve and connect by providing emergency response, incident management, public information, investigation, biometric analysis, communication, information management, inmate self-service, and monitoring products and services in order to make our world a safer place to live. Securus Technologies focuses on connecting what matters®. To learn more about our full suite of civil and criminal justice technology solutions, please visit SecurusTechnologies.com.

SOURCE Securus Technologies, Inc.