Patent Law Practice Center

Patent Attorneys Leave Firms for NPEs

OK it’s Super Bowl season so forgive the football picture but are some top patent litigators switching sides?

An article by the Wall Street Journal describes the transition of two patent attorneys who left incredibly lucrative careers representing some of the biggest companies in the world to work for nonpracticing entities:

As recently as three years ago, the two lawyers were among a small group of elite attorneys used by U.S. companies to defend their patents in courtrooms.

Mr. Desmarais was a lawyer for such companies as International Business Machines Corp., GlaxoSmithKline PLC, Boston Scientific Corp., Alcatel-Lucent SA and Verizon Wireless. The clients of Mr. Powers included Cisco Systems Inc., Merck & Co., MicrosoftCorp., Oracle Corp., Samsung Electronics Co., and Apple Inc.

But in the last couple of years, both men have turned about-face. They have created practices to represent not the largest, most tech-savvy companies, but to work for patent-holding plaintiffs known as “nonpracticing entities,” or what some critics call “patent trolls.”