Christopher D. Sullivan

Christopher D. Sullivan is a Managing Partner at Sullivan Pratt LLP (also known as Sullivan Blackburn Pratt LLP), a San Francisco-based firm specializing in complex civil litigation. His practice encompasses intellectual property, business and commercial law, corporate insolvency, financial disputes, and professional malpractice. While his broader experience covers a wide range of complex disputes, his patent litigation work, based on available records, includes matters involving software and augmented reality (AR) technologies.

In patent litigation, Mr. Sullivan has appeared as lead counsel for plaintiffs. His most prominent tracked case is NantWorks, LLC et al. v. Niantic, Inc. (N.D. Cal., case number 3:20-cv-06262), where he represented the plaintiff. In this case, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California granted summary judgment in favor of the defendant, Niantic, Inc., invalidating NantWorks' augmented reality patents (U.S. Patent Nos. 10,664,518 and 10,403,051) under 35 U.S.C. § 101 for being directed to abstract ideas. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed this ruling on April 23, 2026, finding the AR-related patent claims ineligible.

There is no information publicly available that indicates Christopher D. Sullivan regularly appears in PTAB or IPR proceedings.

Mr. Sullivan earned his B.A. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1985. He received his J.D. magna cum laude from the University of California Hastings College of Law (now UC College of the Law, San Francisco) in 1990, where he served as Editor-in-Chief of the Hastings Law Journal and was inducted into the Order of the Coif. Following law school, he clerked for the Honorable Melvin T. Brunetti of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He was admitted to the California Bar in 1990.