A recognized leader in IP counseling and litigation to universities and other primary research organizations, Fenwick & West has a long history of helping some of the world’s most distinguished academic and research institutions protect their inventions and maximize the commercial value of their investments. We collaborate with these clients to capture and build value from basic, clinical and translational research activities. Given our practitioners’ advanced technical degrees, we are extremely comfortable communicating with inventors in academic and research environments.
And because we thoroughly understand the complex ownership, commercialization and enforcement issues faced by these organizations, it’s no surprise that leading academic and research institutions such as the University of California, The Scripps Research Institute, the University of Washington, Vanderbilt University, Harvard, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory rely on Fenwick for a full range of IP and technology transaction services, including strategic IP counseling, patent prosecution, patent infringement and enforcement counseling, dispute resolution, IP litigation, licensing and other transaction work.
What You Can Expect With Fenwick on Your Team
One of the nation’s highest ranked IP practices
In 2012, The National Law Journal named Fenwick to its inaugural "Intellectual Property Hot List," one of only 20 firms selected. The firm is also ranked consistently as one of the top five West Coast firms in both intellectual property litigation and protection over at least the past 10 years by Euromoney’s Managing Intellectual Property publication.
Sophisticated technical and business advice
Our more than 50 patent professionals include patent attorneys, agents and engineers – many of whom are registered to practice before the United States Patent and Trademark Office – and have advanced technical degrees, including more than a dozen Ph.D.’s, in a variety of scientific areas. Our patent professionals have deep expertise managing patent portfolios in a wide range of technologies, including business methods, computer hardware, personalized medicine, clean technology, small molecule chemistry, semiconductor processing and physics. And because our patent attorneys routinely work on cross-practice teams for high-stakes litigation, large corporate deals and complex technology transactions, we excel at incorporating the perspective and skills of other legal practices into our prosecution practice. This cross-fertilization keeps us current with issues pertinent to patent prosecution; it allows us to develop sophisticated approaches that anticipate rejections and how the patents are likely to be deployed and challenged in the commercial context.
Strategic licensing advice
Our firm’s size, culture of cross-practice collaboration between corporate, litigation, patent and licensing groups, and proximity to the epicenter of innovation, means our licensing practitioners are closely attuned to product cycles, and the application of core technologies to commercial products. This allows us to provide strategic licensing advice that encompasses the cyclical nature of invention and commercialization, enabling our academic and research institution clients to commercialize inventions efficiently while coaxing maximum value out of core research.
24/7 electronic access to all patent prosecution files
In addition to handling ground-breaking patent work for some of the world’s most innovative organizations, we invest heavily in ways to improve the delivery of services while reducing costs. Our paperless patent practice – a service that Fenwick will provides at no charge to our clients – provides full electronic access to client patent prosecution files, including images for prior art and correspondence received from the Patent Office, streamlining the patent portfolio management process in a seamless and confidential manner.