Overview

Melissa Patterson is an associate in the Intellectual Property Practice Group. Melissa spends her in-office time at the firm's San Diego (Del Mar), Washington D.C., and Silicon Valley offices.

Areas of Practice

Melissa focuses her practice on the preparation and prosecution of patent applications, licensing, and litigation matters, particularly in the areas of software, computer hardware, mobile communications, AI, robotics, and financial networks. She has prosecuted more than 1,000 U.S. and foreign patent matters, including acting as foreign counsel and working with foreign counterparts in other jurisdictions. In her IP licensing practice, Melissa analyzes current and former open source licensing terms and, with her ongoing computer programming expertise, opines on patent and licensing issues for her clients. Melissa has also assisted with over 200 trademark matters, conducted non-infringement and invalidity analyses for numerous IP litigation matters and assisted with patent licensing matters, and assisted with various technical aspects of patent litigation cases.

Experience

Experience

Representative Matters

  • Prosecuted more than 1,000 U.S. and foreign patent matters for clients ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies
  • Drafted in excess of 500 original patent applications, including conducting thorough invention disclosures and preparing claims, figures and specifications
  • Patent prosecution included various technical and business art units with the USPTO
  • Reviewed current and former open source licensing terms to draft plain language strategies for clients’ to discuss with their internal programming departments
  • Drafted strategies for working with data use restrictions in view of open source licensing restrictions for various commercial uses

Honors

Honors

Ones to Watch - Intellectual Property Law, Best Lawyers, 2023

Group Recognition, Intellectual Property Law Section SDCBA, for Variety of New Lawyer Content, San Diego County Bar Association, 2021

Group Recognition, Intellectual Property Law Section SDCBA, for Commitment to New Lawyers, San Diego County Bar Association, 2019

Insights

Speaking Engagements

  • Panelist, "10 Year Review of ICS," University of California, Irvine, April 20, 2023
  • Panelist, "5 Things Every Engineer/Programmer Needs to Know About Patents," University of California, Irvine, April 12, 2023
  • Moderator, "Patent Practice Foreign Filing and Prosecution Tips," San Diego County Bar Association, December 15, 2022 
  • Moderator, "AI/ML: Myth or Reality?" Los Angeles Intellectual Property Law Association's Washington in the West Conference, June 23, 2022
  • Panelist, "UC Irvine ICS Alumni Lunch & Learn: Intellectual Property Strategy for Software," ICS Alumni Chapter's Lunch & Learn, April 9, 2021 
  • Panelist, “Roundtable: How to Get Into Intellectual Property Practice with Any Background,” San Diego County Bar Association, Webinar, March 4, 2021
  • Moderator, "Innovation in the Age of COVID-19," San Diego County Bar Association Virtual Roundtable, May 19, 2020

Memberships

Memberships

Executive Committee Member and Former Chair, Intellectual Property Law Section, San Diego County Bar Association

Education

J.D., Loyola University, 2011

B.S., Information and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine, 2003

Ongoing Technical Certifications

  • IT Fundamentals for Cybersecurity. IBM on Coursera, 2020

  • Machine Learning, Stanford University on Coursera, 2018
  • Neural Networks and Deep Learning, deeplearning.ai on Coursera, 2019

Admissions

  • California
  • U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California
  • U.S. Patent and Trademark Office
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