Brian D. Melton

I'll research this attorney's professional background before drafting.

Let me dig deeper into his practice areas, notable patent results, and PTAB work.

Brian D. Melton — Patent Litigation Practice Summary

Brian D. Melton is a partner in Susman Godfrey LLP's Houston office, where his practice blends complex commercial trial work with patent and IP litigation (Super Lawyers lists his practice areas as business litigation and intellectual property; his firm bio and interview comments describe a substantial patent docket). His patent work spans several technology areas rather than a single niche: semiconductor/power-device patents (SiC MOSFETs in Purdue v. Wolfspeed), biometric authentication and secure-transaction technology (the Proxense campaigns, which assert patents on biometric "personal data key" authentication and device-side secure elements), data encryption/secure communications (TQP Development v. Intuit), and optical lens design/manufacturing (Fresnel Technologies v. Rokonet).

Side preference. The tracked docket is exclusively plaintiff-side (5 appearances, 0 defendant-side), representing patent owners and asserting infringement claims. That includes NPE-style plaintiffs (TQP, Proxense) as well as an institutional patent owner (The Trustees of Purdue University). His commercial-trial practice includes both plaintiff and defense engagements outside patent law, but his patent appearances in this data set are all as plaintiff's counsel.

Notable cases. In Proxense, LLC v. Google he was lead counsel in the biometric authentication campaign in the Western District of Texas (Judge Albright); the case was dismissed with prejudice in January 2025, consistent with a license, after Samsung settled in 2023. The same client's patents were upheld in a USPTO ex parte reexamination of the '730 patent, though the PTAB separately found a Proxense patent claim unpatentable as obvious in the parallel Apple case (June 2025). Purdue v. Wolfspeed (M.D.N.C.), asserting SiC MOSFET patents against Wolfspeed, ended in a confidential settlement and dismissal with prejudice in March 2025. In Fresnel Technologies v. Rokonet he tried and won a patent infringement case with treble damages and attorney fees based on willfulness findings, settling on appeal. He also served as lead trial lawyer in a royalty/IP-adjacent case for Steven Lamar, winning a $25 million jury verdict against Beats, Dr. Dre, and Jimmy Iovine. In IPRs he appears on the patent-owner side — PTAB filings list him as counsel for Proxense in IPR2024-01333, IPR2024-00784, and IPR2025-00074, and as patent-owner litigation counsel in IPR2020-00984 — so he is a regular defender of challenged claims rather than a petitioner's counsel.

Bar / education. Admitted to the Texas bar in 1999; J.D., University of Houston Law Center (1999), per his Super Lawyers profile. No prior law firms are reflected in the available sources; no in-house role appears.

Note: One archived N.D. Cal. filing lists his email among counsel associated with "Defendant Apple Inc.," which is inconsistent with the otherwise uniformly plaintiff-side tracked docket; that document's caption/counsel extraction is ambiguous and I could not verify it, so I have not relied on it.