Press

Feb. 24, 2003

Think Big

With just about every lawyer these days touting his premier copyright, trademark and patent practice, who really stands heads above the rest in intellectual property law? We offer a brain trust of 25 lawyers who comprise the state’s best and brightest in the white-hot specialty.

By Robin Davidson

Ronald Laurie Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom (Palo Alto) At 60, Laurie has succeeded at a little bit of everything in intellectual property. His legal career began with patent prosecution in 1968 and then wound its way through the courtroom for the likes of Hewlett-Packard and Texas Instruments a decade later. In the late 1980s, he ventured into a new area, cultivation a niche in the undeveloped transactional world of intellectual property. In doing so, he’s developed a top mergers and acquisitions practice for companies in the computer and communications industries. He was Compaq’s top IP lawyer in its merger with Hewlett-Packard in 2001. Other high-tech clients who call on him for M&A work include Alta Vista Company, Applied Matrerials and Yahoo! Inc.

It’s not enough to say you’re an intellectual property lawyer these days. Everyone else says the same thing.

The first-year associate down the hall who made photocopies at Kinko’s for that big client pitch probably lists copyright as an area of expertise on his resume.

The number of attorneys angling for a piece of the intellectual property action is vast enough to create more than a few hurdles for Daily Journal EXTRA in our search for California’s top lawyers in the field.

Not ones to make the process any easier on ourselves, we cast a broad net. Instead of focusing on parent litigators or tossing aside law school professors or in-house counsel, we left the scope of intellectual property practice wide open. The only requirement was that the attorneys reside in California.

We took submissions from law firms, dissecting each candidate to verify clients and cases. We called experts in the field to solicit their opinions on who the best really are, and we spent hours doing our own research into the biggest names, cases and companies with IP hooks.

When all was said and done, we found we had quite an assortment of lawyers – from lifelong intellectual property practitioners to career trial lawyers with a relatively recent penchant for IP cases. Below we offer the 25 Lawyers, listed in alphabetical order, who made our cut as California’s top intellectual Property lawyers.