Patents

Over the past decade our clients, representative of the entire U.S. economy, have found increasing value in intellectual property assets.  Clients now speak of “IP Portfolios” and many business formation, sale, financing, joint venture, and other transactions are directed specifically at commercializing or “monetizing” IP.

Patent protection is the most prevalent strategy in the U.S. and the world for monetizing invented devices and methods.  Assignments and licenses are yielding enormous sale and royalty incomes for successful patentees.  In no area of legal service is it more vital to have professionals who understand the business, the science, and the financial strategy, as well as the law.  Patents must be expertly drafted to secure issuance, to enforce their value by covering infringing activities, and to survive inevitable challenges to their validity in litigation.

Our IP attorneys practice before the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office and coordinate parallel foreign patent protection through established relationships with top overseas firms.  A fundamental philosophy of our team structure pairs these lawyers hand-in-hand with the litigators who regularly enforce patents against infringers and defend them against validity challenges.  Patent language is created with an eye, from the inception, toward how it will be attacked by client adversaries and how successfully it can be understood and validated by Judges and juries.

We have enabled clients to create, protect, and commercialize inventions in an extremely wide range of technologies, including pharmaceuticals, transgenic animals, medical devices, computer software, chemical formulations, zinc-air batteries, infrared detection systems, microelectronics, disk drives, communication systems, propulsion machinery, absorbent articles, drafting devices, oil field tools, exhaust systems, and a range of business methods.

We are serious about our lawyers’ qualities as outstanding business counselors as well as scientists and technicians.

Patent litigation is too often too expensive.  Hundreds of thousands of dollars in litigation costs can be avoided through prudent patent planning and drafting.  This is a classic area where an ounce of prevention is worth a ton of cure.

We do all the usual patent services like searches, claim drafting, application prosecution, interferences, and advice on infringement and validity.  But what distinguishes our approach is our concrete partnering with clients to realize the financial, educational, or other value they seek from their IP, and our ongoing investment in research to bring new IP opportunities, frontiers and strategies to our clients.