The practice

Station 1 of 5. It begins in the written record

The first work of this career was not arguing. It was writing patents and getting them granted, hundreds of applications drafted or supervised, which means years spent on the other end of the conversation that every patent dispute later argues about.

That conversation lives in the file wrapper, the public back and forth between an applicant's lawyers and the patent office. To get a patent granted, applicants very often narrow what they are claiming. Those narrowings are permanent, they are public, and they set the outer limit of what the patent can honestly be argued to mean a decade later.

Most of it is dull reading. It is also where a case is frequently won or lost before anyone stands up in a courtroom, which is why the prosecution record gets read completely, and first, rather than summarized by someone else.

Station 2 of 5. Federal district courts

Patent cases are tried in federal district courts, and they are tried wherever the case lands, not wherever counsel happens to live. The clients have ranged from companies barely past the startup stage to some of the most valuable technology companies in the world, and the work has run in both directions, for patent owners and for the companies accused of infringing.

Both sides matter more than it sounds. A lawyer who has only ever asserted patents tends to overvalue them, and one who has only ever defended tends to miss what a good patent can actually do.

Judges before whom these cases have been argued include:

• Lucy Koh
• Rodney Gilstrap
• Vince Chhabria
• Leonie Brinkema
• Jon McCalla
• Catherine C. Blake
• Mary Pat Thynge
• Susan van Keulen
• Jan DuBois
• Philip Gutierrez
• B. Lynn Winmill

Station 3 of 5. Nine months in the client's chair

A secondment at T-Mobile put the work in-house for nine months as intellectual property counsel. The job there was not litigating. It was building out a portfolio, managing outside counsel, sitting with inventors to understand what they had actually made, and weighing offensive and defensive strategy against a budget that had other claims on it.

The useful part of that experience is unglamorous: it is knowing what an outside lawyer's invoice looks like when it lands on a desk that also has to fund engineering, and knowing which updates are worth a meeting and which are worth a paragraph.

Station 4 of 5. The Patent Trial and Appeal Board

Not every patent fight happens in a courtroom. Some happen at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, inside the patent office itself, in a proceeding called an inter partes review that asks a narrower question: should this patent have been granted at all?

It runs on a different clock and a different budget than a district court case, and it is decided by administrative patent judges who understand the technology rather than by a jury who has never seen it. Whether it belongs in a given matter is a strategic question worth raising early.

This practice has included multiple inter partes reviews, five of them argued in person, along with covered business method proceedings and ex parte reexaminations.

Station 5 of 5. The Federal Circuit

Patent appeals from every district court in the country go to one place, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. That is where a claim construction ruling gets tested, and where a case that felt settled can open again.

The work here has been briefing and oral argument. The argument in Buckman Laboratories v. Solenis sits in the court's public recordings, which is an unusual thing about appellate practice: anyone can listen to how a lawyer answers a hard question from the bench, in real time, without a transcript in between.