Mauricio Flores

Mauricio Flores is Special Counsel in the Intellectual Property Practice Group in the firm's Del Mar Heights and San Francisco offices.

Areas of Practice

Mr. Flores' practice is focused primarily on life sciences and biotechnology patent infringement and trade secret disputes. He has tried more than a dozen cases to a verdict in federal and state courts. In addition to patent and trade secret actions, Mr. Flores has handled cases concerning licensing disputes and the ownership of patent rights to federally-funded research under the Bayh-Dole Act as well as a wide variety of contract and commercial disputes. He was lead counsel for Integra LifeSciences in a seminal case decided by the United States Supreme Court in June 2005 involving the scope of the Hatch-Waxman Act exemption from patent infringement for FDA-related activities. Mr. Flores argued on Integra's behalf before the Supreme Court after winning a 21-day jury trial and prevailing before the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. More recently, Mr. Flores was lead counsel for Beckman Coulter, Inc. in a patent infringement action against Applera Corporation for infringement of Beckman Coulter's patents on capillary electrophoresis systems using replaceable polymerized gels. The accused instruments were Applera’s late-model DNA sequencers used to map the human genome. The case recently settled just before trial, with Applera agreeing to pay $35 million and a taking a royalty-bearing license, as well as granting Beckman Coulter licenses to certain technology.

Mr. Flores also served as a trial attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Division, under the Department's Honor Law Graduate Program. From 1980 to 1993 he was an associate promoted to partner at a major national firm in the general litigation department.

Prior to joining Sheppard Mullin, Mr. Flores was a partner in the Intellectual Property, Media & Technology Department of another national law firm. Mr. Flores was a founding partner of Campbell & Flores, LLP, a San Diego law firm focused exclusively on biotechnology intellectual property (1992-2003)

Education

• J.D., Harvard Law School, 1977
• A.B., San Diego State University, 1973

Clerkships

• Clerked for the Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court

Admissions

• California
• District of Columbia
• U.S. District Courts
• U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth and Federal Circuits
• United States Supreme Court

Memberships

• Board of directors, San Diego Legal Aid Society

Articles

• "Taking the Profit out of Biomedical Research Tools," appeared in Nature Biotechnology

Speeches

• Mr. Flores has published and lectured on a wide variety of issues related to biotechnology litigation and licensing. His recent lecture topics have included, "Biotechnology Litigation as a Multi-Disciplinary Enterprise," "Due Diligence in the Acquisition of Biotechnology Intellectual Property," and "Licensing the Tools of Biotechnology."
• He recently spoke on the Integra decision at a special session for the 2005 BIOCOM convention.