Enforcement, disputes and litigation

A company’s competitive position in the marketplace often is determined by intellectual property rights. Unless safeguarded, a company’s innovations, technical advancements and brands are at risk of being compromised. When a competitor infringes on a company’s rights, or someone threatens to sue a business for an alleged violation of its intellectual property rights, Porter Wright’s attorneys have the experience in the intricacies of both litigation and substantive intellectual property law issues to protect our clients' interests.

Intellectual property litigation frequently involves litigating with competitors, and we help protect our clients’ interests from the multitude of problems associated with sharing competitively sensitive information during the litigation discovery process. Whether the dispute involves patents, trademark, copyrights, unfair competition, trade secrets, privacy rights or false advertising, our attorneys have the technical knowledge and experience dealing with engineers and technical experts to fully represent interests in any type of complex dispute.

Our attorneys regularly protect the competitive positions of our clients in intellectual property disputes, including:

  • Enforcing patents against infringement by others: When necessary, we protect our clients' patent rights by bringing infringement lawsuits against infringers in courts throughout the United States to prevent unlicensed use of our clients' inventions.
  • Defending against charges of patent infringement by others: We defend our clients against allegations of patent infringement in all geographic areas of the United States.
  • Trademark litigation: We represent our clients' interests in all state and federal courts throughout the United States in disputes over trademark rights. We also represent our clients in disputed trademark matters in administrative proceedings, such as opposition and cancellation proceedings before the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board of the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
  • Copyright disputes: We represent clients in a wide range of litigated copyright disputes involving the complete range of copyrightable "works," from books to computer software to advertising materials to technical drawings. We also frequently represent clients in disputes over the ownership of copyrightable works.
  • Other types of intellectual property rights: Our attorneys represent clients in all types of disputes involving aspects of intellectual property, such as trade secrets, unfair competition, privacy rights and false advertising disputes.
  • Foreign litigation: Our experience extends to litigating disputes involving our client's intellectual property rights in jurisdictions outside of the United States. We frequently protect foreign rights of our clients in coordination with local counsel in foreign jurisdictions. We have extensive experience working with local counsel in lawsuits in virtually all jurisdictions in Europe and in conducting commercial arbitration involving intellectual property rights, patents, copyrights and trade secrets in Asia.