Litigation
Patent trials in federal court
Twenty-three years of patent litigation across the federal districts where patent cases are actually fought: the Eastern District of Texas, Delaware, the Northern and Central Districts of California, and others. Clients have ranged from near-startups defending their first product to some of the world's most valuable technology companies, on both sides of the v.
The trial record includes jury verdicts, among them a complete victory for TruLog, a manufacturer whose patents were at stake, and a jury trial won opposite Fish & Richardson, one of the most prominent patent firms in the country.
Argument experience runs from claim construction through trial and appeal, before judges including Lucy Koh, Rodney Gilstrap, Vince Chhabria, Leonie Brinkema, Jon McCalla, and Catherine C. Blake. A selection of publicly reported matters is on the representative matters page.
Prosecution & strategy
Begin with the end in mind
The practice began on the other side of the patent system: drafting and supervising hundreds of applications as a prosecutor. That experience shapes everything since. A litigator who has written claims knows where they break; a prosecutor who has tried cases writes claims that hold.
Portfolio work follows the same logic. Nine months on secondment as IP counsel at T-Mobile meant sitting on the client's side of the table: developing and maintaining a portfolio, managing outside counsel, working directly with inventors, harvesting ideas, and weighing offensive and defensive strategy against a budget. That perspective, of what in-house teams actually need from their outside lawyers, does not come from a seminar.
The strategy work extends to trademarks, copyright, TTAB proceedings, and domestic and international IP transactions, with counseling on blockchain and digital assets grounded in Wharton executive education on the subject.
PTAB & Federal Circuit
Post-grant and appellate work
Multiple inter partes review proceedings before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, including five IPR arguments made in person, along with covered business method proceedings and ex parte reexaminations. In one PTAB matter, obviousness assertions against a client's fraud-detection patent were rejected by the Board; in another line of work, a final written decision came down in favor of Apple.
At the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, the record includes briefing and oral argument; the argument in Buckman Laboratories v. Solenis is in the court's public recordings.
Technical fields
Read at the level it was written
Two engineering degrees and early-career work in SCADA control systems, semiconductor process data, and network engineering mean the technical record is home ground, not a translation exercise. Fields handled in litigation and prosecution include:
- Cryptography, encryption, and digital security
- Two-factor and multi-factor authentication
- Telecommunications and digital communications
- Software and computer architecture
- Imaging and encoding
- Chemistry and materials
- Blockchain and digital assets
How matters are run
Leverage, not burn rate
Every matter starts the same way: master the record before choosing the strategy. What follows from that is a case run for leverage rather than motion practice for its own sake. Pressure gets applied where the record supports it, clients hear honest options in plain language at every decision point, and the budget is treated as part of the strategy, not an afterthought.
Clients say this more credibly than any website can. In one dispute, that approach meant finding weaknesses in the opposing patent's prosecution history that changed the leverage in the case and helped resolve it on favorable terms. In another, it meant a jury trial prepared so thoroughly that the verdict was, in the client's words, complete and decisive.
“What stood out most was Jesse's combination of technical understanding, strategic pressure, and cost discipline. His work helped put us in a strong position to resolve the matter on favorable terms.”