Daniel Zaheer

I'll research Daniel Zaheer's professional background before drafting.

Let me verify a few notable case outcomes and PTAB involvement.

One more verification pass on the Propel Fuels verdict and his PTAB/IP role.

Daniel Zaheer — Patent Litigation Practice Summary

Specialty / focus areas. Zaheer is an IP litigator at Kobre & Kim whose practice centers on patent infringement and trade secret disputes. His firm bio and engagement history cluster around wireless communications technology — Wi-Fi/IEEE 802.11 standard-essential patents, cellular and antenna technology, and mobile device interfaces and applications — alongside biotechnology and agricultural genomics (his firm lists him as lead trial counsel in a CSIRO omega-3 crop-engineering patent trial), pharmaceuticals, and thermal engineering (he has advised a Netherlands design company on its data-center cooling patent portfolio). Trade secret misappropriation is a substantial secondary line of work, particularly in the M&A/due-diligence context.

Side preference. The structured tracking shows a genuinely mixed docket — one plaintiff-side matter (as lead counsel) and one defendant-side matter (as counsel), both at Kobre & Kim. That matches his public profile: most of his highest-profile patent work is patentee-side enforcement (CSIRO, Fractus, and the licensing entities Rosetta-Wireless and RJ Technology), while his defense work has largely been on the trade secret side, including the Daewoong "Botox War" litigation where his firm reports complete district court dismissals and a reversal of most ITC relief on appeal. On the patent side specifically, he leans toward enforcing rather than defending.

Firm context. He has been at Kobre & Kim since February 2015, joining the firm's IP litigation practice and now based in San Francisco; IAM/WIPR materials describe him as a co-founder of the firm's IP team. Before that he was a partner in the IP practice at Kerr & Wagstaffe LLP, and earlier practiced at Quinn Emanuel and served as a deputy city attorney for the City and County of San Francisco. He is not in-house.

Notable cases and outcomes. The CSIRO campaign is his most consequential patent matter: enforcement of the '069 Wi-Fi SEP against Cisco and others produced $400 million-plus in payments to CSIRO, and the related Federal Circuit appeal, CSIRO v. Cisco Systems, 809 F.3d 1295 (Fed. Cir. 2015), vacated the $16.2M damages award and established that apportionment principles apply to all standard-essential patents even absent a RAND commitment — a widely cited SEP damages precedent (he served as trial and appellate counsel). He was part of the Kobre & Kim team for Fractus S.A.'s antenna patent suits against Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile in the Eastern District of Texas; the Verizon case settled in March 2026 (no terms disclosed). On the trade secret side, he co-led the trial team with Michael Ng in Propel Fuels v. Phillips 66 (Alameda County Superior Court), which produced a $604.9M jury verdict in October 2024 plus $195M in exemplary damages, for a total award exceeding $833M — one of the largest trade secret judgments in U.S. history, though not a patent case. Note that the two tracked docket entries in the structured case list are untitled, so I cannot tie them to specific named matters.

PTAB / IPR experience. He appears in PTAB proceedings as patent-owner-side counsel, but generally by pro hac vice admission rather than as a registered practitioner — e.g., Rosetta-Wireless (IPR2016-00616 and IPR2016-00622, backup counsel) and RJ Technology (IPR2023-01350). The pro hac vice papers consistently pair him with USPTO-registered local counsel, and I found no evidence he is admitted to the patent bar. His IPR involvement appears occasional rather than a core practice.

Bar / education (sourced from his firm bio). Admitted in California (2005) and before the Federal Circuit, Ninth Circuit, U.S. Supreme Court, and several district courts including the Eastern District of Texas; Stanford Law School JD (Order of the Coif, Stanford Law Review executive editor); UCLA BA. Clerkships with Judge Charles R. Breyer (N.D. Cal.) and Judge Raymond C. Fisher (9th Cir.).