SF Bay Area Intellectual Property Forum

[Anonymous User]

San Francisco/Palo Alto/Silicon Valley/Menlo Park

What are the best firms & locations for IP litigation (i.e. MoFo SF over Kirkland PA). Looking for quality of IP Lit work and office atmosphere (aka: what are the people like). Also, is there any reason to worry over a smaller office or smaller SA class size when looking at firms?

Lastly, how much weight should I put into the C&P bands? I am interested in interesting work but want to be in an environment that is not "stuffy."

[Anonymous User]

What do you mean by IP litigation? Like hard or soft IP?

[Anonymous User]

http://www.chambersandpartners.com/Usa/Editorial/70618

Maybe that helps. Also, I imagine most firms in the Bay Area, especially Silicon Valley, are not stuffy. There is a different culture in CA than NYC.

[Anonymous User]

What do you mean by IP litigation? Like hard or soft IP?

hard. but I am not foreclosing the idea that I may like soft IP as well.

[Anonymous User]

The chambers listing posted in this thread has a good breakdown with all the players. I'll list some thoughts on them in order here:

Irell, of course, doesn't have a Bay Area office.

Quinn has medium-sized offices both in SF and Palo Alto. They have been working hard on the Samsung matters for the last couple of years, and have quite a few Google matters, too. Their Bay offices are IP- and white collar-centric.

Mofo has a large (home) office in SF. They represent Apple in quite a few different matters. They have more diverse practice areas than Quinn's SF office - they also do patent prosecution and IP transactional work, energy regulatory work, etc.

Fish & Richardson seems like a cool place to work and I've heard good things, but not much more concrete than that.

durie tangri is a patent lit boutique that does great work but isn't really an option for someone straight from law school as far as I can tell. If you want to stay in the space long-term this might be a good lateral option eventually.

As far as environments go, I like the folks in all of the offices I've mentioned and think they will all provide good patent lit experience. None of those I've mentioned have reputations for being stuffy - in my experience, Gibson, O'Melveny, and Kirkland seemed a little stuffy, but I really can't say that with much confidence.

[Anonymous User]

http://www.chambersandpartners.com/Usa/Editorial/70618

Maybe that helps. Also, I imagine most firms in the Bay Area, especially Silicon Valley, are not stuffy. There is a different culture in CA than NYC.

This is misleading. The "local" rankings are biased towards smaller firms based in the area, which doesn't correlate with the success of any given firm in the space. If you're looking at hard IP, the SV offices of top law firms are your best bet -- the Kirkland, Weil, Quinn. You'll generally get a very relaxed atmosphere but with the prestige, backing, and quality of work you would expect from the top name.