Ask for the moon and you’ll be surprised how often you get it. That’s a mantra the so-called “patent trolls” have thrived on for years.

Cisco Systems Inc. believes a settlement it reached in Chicago’s federal court last month may bring future demands in patent-infringement cases back down to earth. But law professors are not as convinced.

Claiming just about anybody who wirelessly accessed the Internet violated its patents, Innovatio IP Ventures LLC at one point attempted to collect more than $4 billion in damages and license fees.

It settled with Cisco for a fraction of that demand — $2.7 million.

The settlement marks an end to more than three years of litigation that began when Innovatio — viewed by some as a patent troll that files lawsuits and makes no products — demanded $2,500 or more from individual coffee shops, hotels and other businesses that provided Wi-Fi to customers.

The vast monetary divide between what Innovatio sought and what it got is partly a result of the uncertainty and difficulty involved in placing value on patents — especially during litigation.

Innovatio initially said its patents pertaining to Wi-Fi chips were worth thousands of dollars for every wireless router Cisco sold; a judge ruled it was closer to 10 cents for every unlicensed Wi-Fi chip; the settlement valued the patents around 3 cents for every unlicensed chip.

The largely unknown value of patents — coupled with the high cost of litigation — is a large reason why patent trolls so often get the toll they ask for.

But Cisco didn’t pay up and instead spent $13 million in legal fees — largely to their lawyers at Kirkland & Ellis LLP — to beat back Innovatio’s claims.

“Probably the most extraordinary thing about this case is (Cisco) spent $13 million in legal fees and then $2.7 million in a settlement,” said Jonathan Masur, professor at University of Chicago Law School.

“Maybe Cisco is signaling to other firms out there, ‘Don’t come after us, because we’re going to litigate you into the ground as well.’”

Neal Ruben, vice president of litigation at San Jose, Calif.-based Cisco, said opening the pocketbook on this case resulted in more than just a favorable settlement and relief from the headache Innovatio’s letters caused its customers.

The result of this case — especially an analysis U.S. District Judge James F. Holderman applied to value Innovatio’s patents at about 10 cents a chip — should add some clarity to the muddled way in which patents are valued in litigation, Ruben said.

“If you’re a patent owner and you’ve seen the way the Innovatio case played out,” Ruben said, “you have to be on notice that you’re going to do yourself a disservice by asking for irrationally high damage numbers at the beginning.”

Matthew G. McAndrews, Innovatio’s head lawyer and a partner at Niro, Haller & Niro, said he is pleased with the result of the litigation as well.

Holderman ruled that Innovatio’s patents were among the top 10 percent of the most valuable patents related to standard Wi-Fi. And Holderman’s determination that the patents are worth 9.56 cents a chip bodes well, McAndrews said, for Innovatio’s latest licensing campaign — seeking money from chip manufacturers.

“There are hundreds of millions of Wi-Fi chips in the marketplace sold by unlicensed chip suppliers,” McAndrews said. “So, we’re focused now on Innovatio’s dialogue with those suppliers.”

The Innovatio case became one of the closest followed patent lawsuits across the country after business owners received Innovatio’s letters asking for $2,500 or more for providing Wi-Fi services.

Not least among the many criticisms of Innovatio’s tactics was the size of their requested fee, considering the wireless routers that were said to infringe Innovatio’s patents could cost as little as $75.

Patent blogs and even mainstream media including National Public Radio used the case to highlight the ills of patent lawsuits. It struck a nerve when McAndrews said Innovatio could potentially sue anyone who accessed the Internet on their cellphones. The case was also featured in a Chicago Lawyer magazine article last April.

At another news-making point in the litigation, Cisco unsuccessfully brought claims of Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) fraud against Innovatio, calling its tactics similar to Mafia-style extortion. There’s no telling how many of the 14,000 Wi-Fi-using businesses that received Innovatio’s letters actually paid their demand.

Regardless, Cisco’s lawyer said there is no doubt that Innovatio ultimately paid for the high price it asked early in the case.

The patents at issue — acquired by Innovatio from international tech giant Broadcom Corp. — were obligated to be licensed at a so-called “reasonable and non-discriminatory” (RAND) rate. That is because Broadcom agreed to enter them into a widely used “standard technology” — known as 802.11 Wi-Fi. In exchange for entering patents into widely used standards, patent owners must agree to offer them, essentially, to anybody who wants a license and can pay a RAND rate.

There has long been uncertainty around the definition of RAND rates. But whatever the RAND rate for a Wi-Fi chip patent is, Cisco argued in a breach-of-contract claim that it could not be multiple times more than the price of the final product.

“The fact that it’s a standards-essential patent should have been a boon to Cisco,” Masur said.

Holderman’s ruling in October — which Cisco’s Ruben called “the start of this play” — determined the RAND rate to be 9.56 cents. The final settlement was discounted to around 3 cents, Ruben said, taking into consideration the value of Cisco’s breach-of-contract claim, which was dismissed in the settlement.

Holderman’s ruling — only the second in the country to define a RAND rate — created a complex hypothetical negotiation between the patent owner and a licensee. It takes into account the number of patents involved in a particular technology, their relative value, the date at which the negotiations would have taken place (in this case, 1997, when Wi-Fi came out) and a long list of other factors.

It is this framework that Cisco hopes will be so valuable for valuing patents in future litigation.

“The parties ... that spent a lot of time and money on this have invested in a judge and an outcome that can have legs and can provide real guidance in all kinds of jurisdictions in many instances where the question is, ‘Well, what is a fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory license?’” Ruben said.

“This gives some real guidance in the future. And if it does give that guidance, then it was time and money well spent.”

But two law professors are skeptical about how widely used Holderman’s ruling will be.

David L. Schwartz, associate professor of law and co-director of the center for empirical studies of intellectual property at IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law, said other judges may study Holderman’s approach especially because he is a well-respected judge.

But his ruling is not binding.

“An appellate ruling on the same issue would bind all judges,” Schwartz said. “By settling the case, there is still no federal circuit case law on the issue.”

Michael Risch, a professor at Villanova University School of Law who has written extensively on patent litigation, hopes Holderman’s damages analysis could be a useful guideline for the much more common lawsuits that do not involve standards-essential patents.

But he said seeking a silver-bullet solution — either through resolution of this case or through patent reform legislation — may be misguided.

“Because these are all different cases with different players, patents and merits, trying to have a one-size solution is going to be very difficult,” Risch said. “Sure, Cisco didn’t want to spend that $13 million, but it’s unclear how patent reform would fix that.”

In other words, the moon may still be worth asking for.