Molly Kocialski has been appointed director of the USPTO’s Rocky Mountain regional office in Denver, Colorado.
Kocialski has more than 20 years of experience in intellectual property. Most recently, she was the senior patent counsel for Oracle America in Denver, responsible for managing its patent prosecution docket and all of the post-grant PTAB proceedings and patent investigations. Before joining Oracle, she worked at Qwest Corporation and was in private practice in New York and in Colorado.
Kocialski has previously served as the chair of the intellectual property section of the Colorado Bar Association and is currently on the Colorado Bar Association’s board of governors.
All four of the USPTO’s regional offices now have directors. Hope Shimabuku, director of the Texas regional office in Dallas, was sworn in on January 3.
Jeffrey Snow has joined Pryor Cashman as a partner in its New York office. He joins from New York-based intellectual property law firm Cooper & Dunham, where he was also a partner. Before that, he served as the director of IP at Barnes & Noble.
Snow’s experience includes patent, trade mark and copyright litigation, prosecution, opinions, licensing, and due diligence support for corporate transactions.
Six trade mark and copyright lawyers – Jeffrey Kaufman, Roberta Bren, Kathleen Cooney-Porter, Beth Chapman, Kyoko Imai and Marybeth Peters – have moved their practices to Muncy Geissler Olds & Lowe (MG-IP). All were previously with Oblon.
Kaufman, Bren and Cooney-Porter join as principals, and Chapman and Imai join as of counsel. They have reunited with their former Oblon partner Jay Hines, now a principal of MG-IP. All began their careers at the USPTO. Before joining Oblon, Peters was a former Register of Copyright of the US Copyright Office, and is now an intellectual property advisor for MG-IP. Cooney-Porter led Oblon’s trade mark practice.
Chen Wang, former deputy chief IP Counsel at EI du Pont de Nemours and Company, will be joining The American Intellectual Property Law Association (AIPLA) as deputy executive director for regulatory affairs on January 18.
Wang will be a senior adviser to the executive director, and have principle day-to-day responsibility for AIPLA's international intellectual property policy work and regulatory issues of concern.
Kurt Glitzenstein has been named practice group leader for Fish & Richardson’s litigation group, the firm’s largest practice with 250 lawyers in 12 offices. Glitzenstein is a patent trial lawyer and principal in the firm’s Boston office. He replaces Ann Cathcart Chaplin, who left the firm in December 2015 to become deputy general counsel for litigation at General Motors. Glitzenstein joined the firm in 1992 and became a principal in 2000.
Orrick has added the patent litigation team of Richard DeLucia, Elizabeth Gardner, Antony Pfeffer and Patrick Herman in New York. The team has a focus on patent litigation representing companies in the biotech, pharmaceutical and medical device industries. The group joins from Kenyon & Kenyon, with Delucia, Gardner and Pfeffer appointed partners and Herman appointed of counsel.
David Wang (left) has joined Mayer Brown’s intellectual property practice as a partner in Palo Alto. He was previously a partner with Winston & Strawn in its Silicon Valley office. Wang focuses his practice on patent infringement litigation, trade secret litigation, and adversarial patent licensing negotiations.
Dana Hayter has joined Perkins Coie’s technology transactions and privacy practice as a partner in the firm’s newly-expanded San Francisco office, where he will focus on patent and licensing strategy. Hayter most recently served as vice-president and associate general counsel at Intel Corporation.
Hayter was a leader in Intel’s patent and licensing strategy during the convergence of PCs and mobile devices, and a driver of strategy in transactions involving multiple billions of dollars.
Marc Cavan has joined Baker & McKenzie as a partner in Chicago. He focuses his practice on patent litigation across a range of technologies, and has more than 15 years of experience in life sciences IP litigation. He joins from Ropes & Gray.
Lewis Roca Rothgerber and Christie Parker & Hale have combined to become Lewis Roca Rothgerber Christie.
The combination doubles Lewis Roca Rothgerber’s number of dedicated IP attorneys to about 80. Christie, Parker & Hale includes more than 40 lawyers in Los Angeles and Irvine, California devoted exclusively to intellectual property law.
The combined firm has nearly 300 lawyers in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico.
Dallas-based IP trial boutique Skiermont Puckett has merged with Los Angeles-based commercial litigation boutique Derby Curtis to form Skiermont Derby LLP with offices in both cities.
Skiermont Puckett handles patent, trade mark and other IP litigation. Derby Curtis handles entertainment-related IP litigation, employment disputes, securities claims, professional negligence cases, class actions, and general business litigation.
