David L. McCombs

I'll research this attorney before drafting. Let me run several searches.

Let me verify the specific tracked cases and outcomes.

Specialty / focus. David L. McCombs is a Dallas-based patent lawyer whose practice centers on contested patent work before the PTAB and the Federal Circuit, with parallel district court litigation and licensing/technology-transfer work. The tracked matters and his firm bio point to electronics and telecommunications (Cisco/Centripetal network-security and packet-filtering disputes; Cisco v. Damaka; Fractus antenna patents; Dolby audio licensing), semiconductors and computer hardware (Cirrus Logic v. Greenthread; Intel v. General Video; Intel v. Advanced Cluster Systems), and, per his Haynes Boone profile, semiconductor foundry work for TSMC, open-source software, telephone equipment, medical devices, and oil-field services. His pre-law-practice background was in chemical/materials science, diagnostics, robotics and motion management.

Side preference. The tracked docket is nearly even — 6 plaintiff-side versus 7 defendant-side appearances — but the split is somewhat misleading. Most of the "plaintiff" entries are AIA petition work (Unified Patents, Intel, Cisco, Cirrus Logic appearing as IPR petitioners), so his functional posture is predominantly defense-side: challenging asserted patents on behalf of operating technology companies and defensive aggregators, and defending them where his client is the patent owner. He is not an NPE/PAE-side enforcement specialist.

Firm context. McCombs has been at Haynes and Boone since 1989 and is a partner in the Dallas office; before that he served as in-house patent counsel for a diversified technology company in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. Two entries in the tracked list sit outside that history — Fractus, S.A. v. Unified Patents, LLC (Perkins Coie, lead counsel) and VPR Brands, LP v. Jupiter Research, LLC (Bookoff McAndrews, lead counsel). I could not verify those affiliations as his through web search; his published bios show a continuous Haynes and Boone career, so those entries may reflect co-counsel arrangements or a possible name match with another attorney and should be confirmed before relying on them. (Haynes Boone's Unified Patents work is confirmed separately — e.g., the Entropic petition and Unified Patents, LLC v. IdeaHub appear in firm reporting.)

Notable matters, PTAB emphasis, and credentials. The largest cluster is the Centripetal Networks/Cisco dispute, where he appears on both the district court defense side and the parallel IPR/appeal track, along with related Centripetal v. Palo Alto Networks and In re Centripetal matters; Dolby v. Unified Patents and the IdeaHub matters round out the PTAB docket. Reported outcomes for these cases (including the Centripetal judgment and its subsequent appellate treatment) were not verified in this review and should be checked before being cited. PTAB/IPR work is clearly his signature: Chambers ranks him for PTAB practice, he is a long-running author of the "IPR Tricks of the Trade" column in Reuters/Westlaw Today with Jonathan Bowser, and Haynes Boone's 2024 press release identifies him as a Patexia Top 20 most active PTAB attorney (17th in petitioner activity, 97 cases). He is registered with the USPTO (Reg. No. 32,271), admitted in Texas and before the Federal Circuit, Fifth Circuit, and the E.D., N.D., and W.D. of Texas; J.D., University of Miami (1984); B.S. Physics, Denison University (1981).