Sandip H. Patel, Partner

Sandip Patel advises companies in the chemical and life sciences industries on all aspects of patent matters. He is among a small group of U.S. patent lawyers that has extensive experience in all areas of patent law, including preparing and prosecuting patent applications, patent portfolio management, opinion counseling, inter partes practice before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, litigation in the federal courts, and participation in foreign opposition and litigation matters in Europe and Japan. Clients particularly value this extraordinary breadth of experience in engaging him to resolve their most complex patent issues.

Sandip joined the firm after graduating from Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law. He was trained by a collection of the firm’s leading patent lawyers, who themselves were working at the cutting edge of the law and biotech and chemical sciences. As their apprentice, he learned how to write and prosecute patent applications in ways that strategically strengthened patent portfolios for multinational corporations, like BASF, BP Corporation, International Paper Company, Pfizer, and Raytheon Corporation, among many others. He learned how to draw out of inventors their discoveries. He worked with them to ensure their patents would offer a competitive advantage, and withstand adversarial scrutiny and rigorous foreign opposition systems. Paying it forward, by working with the firm’s junior lawyers, he ensures they too learn these critically important skills.

Early in his career, Sandip learned the basics of patent litigation and how to conduct discovery, how to position clients to advantageously resolve disputes, and how to prepare and participate in federal court trials for companies like Amgen and the Procter and Gamble Company. He also learned how to navigate the arcane and oft-unwritten complexities of Patent Office interferences where the clients he helped were contending for patents on early cancer treatments, genetically-modified plants, and innovations underlying many household consumer products. For more than two decades, he has successfully handled and led contested interferences for many of the companies listed above and also for ACCO Brands, Gillette, Monsanto, Newell Rubbermaid, and Pharmacia & Upjohn, among many others, including smaller companies and universities.

Today he offers clients strategic counseling in all of these areas of patent law, with a particular focus on Patent Office (AIA) trials whose procedural rules were drawn from those used to administer interferences. And he has spent much of the past decade helping clients, including a Nobel Laureate, obtain a robust portfolio of patents worldwide on fundamental CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technologies, including counseling in multiple foreign oppositions and U.S. patent interferences. In these cases and many others, he has benefited from cooperatively working with the best among his peers at other law firms in the U.S. and overseas.

The clients he advises are diverse and include specialty chemical companies, universities, start-ups, and a variety of large, multinational corporations focused on biotechnology, chemicals, or consumer products. Many of the clients he helps are not listed here, as they are not publicly affiliated with the firm. It should come as no surprise that the strategic counseling he offers them is purposely shielded from the public eye. Through recommendations of the above-listed companies and others, new clients find him when they have a particularly challenging issue.

Sandip has a formal education in chemical engineering from Michigan State University (Go Green!), but his work has spanned the entire spectrum of engineering and the chemical and life sciences. And through that experience, he has proven adept at quickly understanding diverse technologies and devising efficient intellectual property strategies that clients have used to achieve their business goals. Sandip also mentors junior lawyers and law school students, and shares his practical insights publicly, having written dozens of articles on various patent law topics.

Sandip’s peers and clients have recognized his legal work and his other successes in numerous attorney directories and awards, including Best Lawyers in America© (since 2016), Illinois Super Lawyers® (since 2013), an “IP Star” (since 2016) in Managing Intellectual Property IP Stars Survey, a “Life Sciences Star” (since 2016) according to LMG Life Sciences, and a “Leading Lawyer” (since 2019) according to Law Bulletin Media’s Leading Lawyers division. Most recently, Sandip was included in the inaugural Lawdragon 500 Leading Litigators in America list. He is grateful for these recognitions, and even more grateful for the many clients that have continued to seek his advice for more than two decades, including Amgen, BASF, and Procter and Gamble. Further, he remains a proud member of the firm, having served for a decade as the chairperson of the firm’s attorney recruiting committee, and currently serves on its executive committee.