VirnetX, a patent-licensing firm with 14 employees, has seen its stock price fall precipitously over the last 24 hours or so after it lost a major patent trial in Texas on Thursday. A jury there ruled that Cisco did not infringe VirnetX’s patents on virtual private networks (VPNs), and that the networking giant didn't have to pay $258 million in damages.

After the verdict was announced, the company’s stock quickly fell by 40 percent. VirnetX’s stock has already lost about 7 percent (hovering around $24 per share) since the markets opened today (as of this writing), and is down from a recent high of around $35 per share before the verdict. While being a patent troll can be a lucrative business model for many firms, VirnetX sustained a net loss of nearly $27 million in 2012.

“We are grateful that a jury in Tyler, Texas, agreed with Cisco that our accused products do not use VirnetX’s technology,” Cisco General Counsel Mark Chandler said in a statement on Thursday. “Cisco will continue to do the right thing for our customers and shareholders by vigorously defending against patent infringement lawsuits that lack merit.”

VirnetX sued Cisco, Apple, NEC and others back in 2010, and it won over $368 million from Apple earlier this year. It also has separate litigation pending against Apple and Mitel Networks.

The Nevada-based company could be a strong contender for being a patent troll under the most basic definition of the term: a company that does not produce a good or service and exists solely to license its intellectual property holdings, and/or engage in litigation to force such a settlement or license. In VirnetX’s own annual report (10-K) filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, it notes that its “portfolio of intellectual property is the foundation of our business model.”

VirnetX reached a $200 million settlement in a related patent case with Microsoft in 2010, which was VirnetX’s first patent licensee.

It’s likely that VirnetX will continue to sue the pants off of other companies that it feels are infringing its patents. Put into its own corporate-legal speak:

“We intend to continue using an outsourced and leveraged model to maintain efficiency and manage costs as we grow our licensing business by offering incentives to early licensing targets or asserting our rights for use of our patents,” the company wrote in its 2013 10-K filing. “We also intend to expand our design pilot in participation with leading 4G/LTE companies (domain infrastructure providers, chipset manufacturers, service providers and others) and build our secure domain name registry.”