David T. Rudolph

I'll research this attorney's professional background before drafting.

Let me verify the tracked cases and check for IPR/PTAB activity and any disambiguation issues.

Professional Summary — David T. Rudolph

Focus areas. Rudolph is a San Francisco litigator whose practice is primarily privacy class actions and antitrust, with patent and IP litigation as a long-standing secondary specialty. His firm bio describes patent work spanning internet services, storage virtualization, semiconductor design, and handheld mobile devices, with patent infringement prosecuted and defended in federal district courts in California and Texas and before the ITC. His two tracked patent matters both concern financial-services and network security technology — the Intellectual Ventures II bank campaign over patents covering encryption/security in electronic transactions, access control for digital property, intrusion detection, firewall/packet filtering, and a cryptographic engine (asserted against banks' PCI data-security compliance and online banking systems). Nothing in the record points to wireless-standards, pharma, or mechanical patent work.

Side preference. On tracked appearances he is 2-for-2 on the plaintiff side, acting for the patent holder, Intellectual Ventures II LLC — once as pro hac vice counsel (IV II v. BBVA Compass Bancshares, N.D. Ala.) and once as co-counsel at Lieff Cabraser (IV II v. Commerce Bancshares, W.D. Mo.). That reflects a discrete engagement with an NPE client rather than a PAE-focused practice; his own firm and prior-firm descriptions state he has both prosecuted and defended infringement claims, and Quinn Emanuel work in his earlier career included representation of patent-holder plaintiffs such as Bright Response LLC and Performance Pricing in the Eastern District of Texas. He has no tracked defendant-side patent appearance.

Firm context. He is a partner at Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein in San Francisco, in the firm's Antitrust & Intellectual Property and Data Privacy groups; he is also an adjunct professor of privacy law at UC College of the Law, San Francisco. Before Lieff Cabraser he was an associate at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, where he litigated patent and copyright matters, and he clerked for the Hon. Saundra Brown Armstrong (N.D. Cal.) in 2007–2008. Bar admissions: California (2004), N.D. Cal. and S.D. Cal. (2008), Ninth Circuit (2009), Federal Circuit (2012). Education: B.A., UC Berkeley (1998); J.D., Berkeley Law (Boalt Hall), 2004, where he was on the Berkeley Technology Law Journal.

Notable matters and outcomes. The two tracked cases are the IV II suits filed in June 2013 against regional banks. Both proved unsuccessful for his client: the patents were challenged in IPR/CBM proceedings (e.g., IPR2014-00682, -00724, -00786, -00801), the Commerce litigation was stayed and then dismissed without prejudice pending those proceedings, and the PTAB invalidated the asserted claims. The Federal Circuit affirmed in Intellectual Ventures II LLC v. Compass Bank (Nos. 16-1416 et al., Dec. 2016) and Intellectual Ventures II LLC v. Commerce Bancshares, Inc. (682 F. App'x 891, Fed. Cir. 2017). Commerce's post-judgment motion for § 285 attorney fees was denied in 2017, with most costs awarded to Commerce. His more prominent recent results are outside patent law — notably court-appointed class counsel in Katz-Lacabe v. Oracle America, which received final approval of a $115 million settlement in the N.D. Cal. in November 2024.

PTAB / IPR. His tracked patent matters were substantially shaped by PTAB proceedings, and third-party attorney profiles list PTAB and Federal Circuit among his forums. However, I could not verify from public PTAB filings that he personally entered appearances or signed papers in those IPRs, so his individual IPR/PGR track record should be described as unconfirmed.

Disambiguation note: Do not confuse this attorney with the LED-lighting patent litigator named David Rudolph (Cornell electrical engineering Ph.D., Columbia J.D.), who is a different lawyer, or with Rudolph Technologies, Inc., a semiconductor equipment company that has appeared as a party — not counsel — in patent suits.