Daniel Knauss

Daniel Knauss — Patent Litigation Practice Summary

Specialty / focus areas. Knauss is a life sciences trial litigator at Cooley LLP (Palo Alto), where he is a partner. His practice centers on high-stakes patent, trade secret, and commercial disputes involving biosimilars and antibody drugs (BPCIA litigation), ANDA/Hatch-Waxman matters, cancer and antiviral medicines, agricultural technology and biofuels, and medical devices, as well as high-tech matters in autonomous vehicles, machine learning, optics, and software. The single tracked appearance — Clean Chemistry, Inc. v. Enviro Tech Chemical Services, Inc. — is consistent with his chemistry-focused practice: it concerns peracetic acid/antimicrobial chemistry patents (U.S. Patent Nos. 8,546,449; 9,363,997; and 9,737,072) litigated in W.D. Texas, where Knauss served as lead counsel for Clean Chemistry.

Side preference. The tracked data shows Knauss on the plaintiff side (1 plaintiff appearance, 0 defendant). However, his broader public case history is predominantly defensive, representing operating companies such as Amgen, Samsung Bioepis, Celltrion/Teva, Gilead, Varian, Zipline, Gevo, and Meta/Facebook in patent suits brought against them. He does work both sides, including enforcement actions for patent owners, but his profile skews toward defending branded pharma and biosimilar makers and high-tech operating companies.

Notable cases / outcomes. Web-verified highlights from his Cooley bio include: representing Amgen in Genentech v. Amgen (D. Del.), defeating a TRO/preliminary injunction to enable launch of the Kanjinti trastuzumab biosimilar, a result affirmed by the Federal Circuit and followed by a global settlement; representing Samsung Bioepis in Alexion v. Samsung Bioepis (D. Del.), defeating Alexion's preliminary injunction and obtaining institution of five IPRs that cleared the path for a Soliris biosimilar; obtaining a complete defense verdict for Gilead against Hoffmann-La Roche in an arbitration over Sovaldi rights; and winning invalidation of all asserted claims in Tele-Publishing Inc. v. Facebook (D. Mass./Fed. Cir.). In the tracked Clean Chemistry matter, related PTAB filings show Clean Chemistry challenging Enviro Tech's '072 patent in IPR2025-01458 while the parallel district case proceeds.

PTAB / IPR experience. Knauss appears regularly in IPR proceedings, both as petitioner and patent-owner counsel, including the five-institution Samsung Bioepis campaign, two IPRs for Meta against PARC (all claims unpatentable, affirmed on appeal), three IPRs in Microsoft v. Windy City Innovations (all claims unpatentable), and IPR countersuits in the Elekta/Varian three-forum battle. He has also tried cases in the ITC and Delaware Chancery and argued before the Federal Circuit.

Bar / education. Knauss earned a J.D. with distinction from Stanford Law School (2009), a Ph.D. in microbiology and cancer biology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison (2004), and a B.S. from Gonzaga University. He is admitted in California (2009), registered with the USPTO (Reg. No. 56,393), and admitted to the Federal Circuit. He joined Cooley around 2010 after working as a patent agent and IP director at a medical diagnostics company.