Connor Houghton

I'll research this attorney before drafting.

Connor S. Houghton — Partner, Reichman Jorgensen Lehman & Feldberg LLP (RJLF), Washington, D.C. (partner since July 1, 2024)

Practice focus. Houghton is a trial and IP litigator whose patent docket is broad rather than concentrated in one technology. Publicly documented matters span data-center infrastructure, thermal management and power (the Valtrus Innovations portfolio of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise-originated cooling and power-supply patents), virtualization and cloud-optimization software (Cirba Inc. d/b/a Densify), optical fiber and networking hardware (Corning Optical Communications), video streaming (Broadcom v. Netflix), antibody-discovery life-science tools (AbCellera/Bruker in N.D. Cal.), and consumer mechanical goods (JetBlack Cycling smart trainers). His undergraduate degree is in chemistry. Nothing in the record indicates Wi-Fi/standards-essential patent work, branded pharma, or Hatch-Waxman litigation.

Side preference. The tracked data show one appearance, plaintiff-side, and the wider public record is consistent with that: he is predominantly a patentee-side litigator. His clients include operating-company plaintiffs (Cirba, Corning, Broadcom, JetBlack) as well as licensing entities (Valtrus Innovations / Key Patent Innovations), and the National Law Journal/Law.com named him a 2026 "Rising Star of the Plaintiffs Bar." Because the tracked dataset captures only the single Valtrus v. TierPoint appearance, the 1-0 plaintiff/defendant split should be read as a floor, not a reliable profile of his practice.

Firm context and credentials. Before RJLF he was an attorney at Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner, where he appears as petitioner's counsel in PTAB filings (e.g., Caterpillar, IPR2017-02185). He is a registered patent attorney (Reg. No. 77,830) and is admitted in Massachusetts and the District of Columbia, before the Federal Circuit, Fourth Circuit, the Court of International Trade, and several district courts. J.D. cum laude, Harvard Law School (2017); B.S. in Chemistry, summa cum laude, Northeastern University (2014).

Notable matters and PTAB work. He was part of the RJLF team that won a $236 million verdict for Cirba against VMware in the District of Delaware in 2020 — a result later vacated on standing grounds and retried — and then helped secure an $84 million willful-infringement verdict against VMware in 2023, recognized in Law.com's Top 100 Verdicts. For Corning he helped obtain a Section 337 general exclusion order barring infringing high-density fiber-optic equipment from the U.S., affirmed in FS.com Inc. v. ITC, No. 22-1228 (Fed. Cir. Apr. 20, 2023). In the tracked Valtrus litigation against TierPoint (E.D. Tex.) over data-center cooling patents, an earlier TierPoint member case (No. 2:24-cv-00776) was dismissed without prejudice while the later-filed action (No. 2:25-cv-00323) proceeded. He handles PTAB work on both sides — as lead counsel for Valtrus as patent owner in IPRs, where per the firm the Board denied institution of three Vertiv petitions, and on the petitioner side during his Finnegan tenure.

Sourcing note: practice descriptions and results above come from the RJLF attorney bio, RJLF and Benchmark Litigation announcements, Federal Circuit and district court filings, and PTAB records. One engagement detail is not fully reconciled: the firm describes Houghton as representing Bruker Cellular Analysis against AbCellera, while a December 2025 filing in N.D. Cal. Case No. 4:20-cv-08624 lists him among counsel for plaintiffs AbCellera and the University of British Columbia.