Unified is Hiring: New full-time Senior Patent Counsel position, internships

Senior Patent Counsel - Click HERE to apply

Unified is again growing its legal department and seeks to add another experienced, registered patent attorney to the team to prosecute and litigate matters in-house. Pay is competitive and counsel will have flexible hours and may work remotely. Ideal applicants should be historically underrepresented in the patent field, and should generally have at least five years of firm or other relevant experience practicing before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) working on post-grant petitions (IPR, PGR, and CBM), reexaminations, or other administrative drafting and litigation experience. Deposition and oral hearing experience are preferred.

Applicants should have a strong technical background and be willing to explore diverse new technologies; experience with video codecs, coding, cryptography, compression, signals, wireless communications, or other algorithmic subject matter is a plus. Patent examination experience is a plus; a registration number is a plus; clerking experience is a plus; familiarity with ongoing appellate issues affecting PTAB practice is a plus.

Legal Interns - Click HERE to apply

Unified is now accepting applications for legal internship and fellowship positions for assisting with its legal and database activities, including PATROLL prior art search contests. A technical background is highly preferred, although some training will be given (e.g., how to search for prior art). Experience with Excel and/or Google Sheets is a must. Interns and fellows will potentially have the ability to assist with PTAB analytics and drafting of papers in IPR proceedings. While the internships are non-paid, we offer flexibility and the option to work remotely. During the position, there will be opportunities to win prize money for contests to find successful prior art on specific patents. For more information and instructions on how to apply, click here.

The Legal Internship has generally been an unpaid position, but Unified will offer tuition stipends per semester for historically underrepresented students entering the patent field currently enrolled in law school. These diversity scholarship stipends will be awarded based on need and availability.

Requirements

  • Experience with MS Excel, Google Sheets

  • JD candidate or graduate

    • Highly preferred to have completed at least one intellectual property course

  • Undergraduate degree in a field of science or engineering highly preferred

  • Experience with prior art searching and analysis preferred

SISVEL patent held unpatentable

On June 25, 2020, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) issued a final written decision in Unified Patents, LLC et al. v. S.I.SV.EL. Societa Italian Por Lo Sviluppo Dell Elettronica S.P.A. et al., holding all but one dependent claim as unpatentable of U.S. Patent 7,734,680, owned by S.I.SV.EL. S.p.A., an NPE. The ’680 patent, directed to a recommendation engine that generates a user profile based on a user’s interests and suggests content based on similar user profiles, has been asserted against Spotify, Rhapsody, and Rakuten in district court. At the time of this decision, only Rhapsody is in active litigation.    

Unified was represented by in-house counsel, Michelle Callahan, and by Jason Mudd from Erise IP in this proceeding. View district court litigation for the ‘680 patent. To read the petition and view the entire case proceeding, see Unified’s Portal. 

Webinar Materials - Proving Up Printed Publication Status in a Pandemic

SPEAKERS:

Jung Hahm – Senior Patent Counsel, Unified Patents

Jason Skinder – Chief IP Counsel, Connected Enterprises, Honeywell

Raghav Bajaj – Partner, Haynes and Boone

Our speakers from Honeywell, Haynes and Boone, and Unified discussed how to establish a reasonable likelihood that a non-patent document qualifies as a printed publication in IPR proceedings in view of the Board's precedential opinion in Hulu, LLC v. Sound View Innovations, LLC, IPR2018-01039, Paper 29 (PTAB Dec. 20, 2019).  They also looked at the challenges of obtaining evidence of public accessibility of documents posed by the pandemic and discussed possible ways to address this issue.

To listen to the recorded webinar, click here: https://vimeo.com/432648865

The slide presentation from this webinar can be seen and downloaded below.

Join us for our next webinar, Amplifying Underrepresented Voices at the PTAB on July 23rd at 12p EST. For more information, visit our website.

Unified Insights Webinar 2 - We discussed how to establish a reasonable likelihood that a non-patent document qualifies as a printed publication in IPR proceedings in view of the Board's precedential opinion in Hulu, LLC v. Sound View Innovations, LLC, IPR2018-01039, Paper 29 (PTAB Dec. 20, 2019).

Cassiopeia IP settles with Unified Patents

On June 24, 2020, the Board issued an order terminating IPR2020-00111 pursuant to a joint settlement request filed by Unified Patents and Cassiopeia IP, an IP Edge affiliate and well-known NPE. U.S. Patent 7,322,046, generally directed to secure use of a network service, has been widely asserted in 18 district court litigations against such companies as Best Buy, Western Digital, Aruba Networks, Epson America, and Funai.

Unified is represented in this proceeding by in-house counsel, Alyssa Holtslander and Roshan Mansinghani, and outside counsel, James Stein from Lee & Hayes, PLLC. View Cassiopeia's district court litigation. To read the petition and view the case record, see Unified's Portal. 

$5,250 Awarded for DivX '486 prior art

Unified is pleased to announce the PATROLL crowdsourcing contest winner, Niels Thorwirth, who received a cash prize of $5,250 for his prior art submission for U.S. Patent 10,212,486. The '486 patent is owned by DivX, LLC, a subsidiary of well-known NPE, Fortress Investment Group, and generally relates to playing back encrypted video involving cryptographic information.

To help the industry fight bad patents, we have published the winning prior art below.

We would also like to thank the dozens of other high-quality submissions that were made on this patent. The ongoing contests are open to anyone, and include tens of thousands of dollars in rewards available for helping the industry to challenge NPE patents of questionable validity by finding and submitting prior art in the contests. Visit PATROLL today to learn more about how to participate.

WINNING SUBMISSION