David Thomas Pollock

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David Thomas Pollock — Patent Litigation Practice Summary

Focus areas. Pollock is a Reed Smith partner in San Francisco (with an office listing in Palo Alto) whose practice is described by the firm as exclusively patent litigation and related issues. His technical focus follows his pre-law career as a medical device and automotive engineer: medical imaging, electrosurgery, aneurysm treatments, biopsy devices, stents, and wound closure on the medical side; vehicle infotainment, navigation, headlight control, and automotive software architecture on the vehicle side. His firm bio also lists consumer products, computer hardware, software, databases, and wireless/network hardware (e.g., network interface adapters, mobile connectivity), plus standard-based matters such as AUTOSAR-compliant vehicle ECUs.

Side preference. Defense-dominant. The tracked appearances show two defendant-side matters and no plaintiff-side matters, and the public matter list is weighted the same way: he regularly defends operating companies in multi-defendant suits brought by non-practicing entities — GE/GE Healthcare, Volvo, Groupon, Ross Stores, IBM, Atheros, SolutionInc, AccessClosure, and Camp Chef. The practice is not exclusively defensive, however; the firm lists offensive assertion work as well, including CamelBak v. Zak! Designs (W.D. Ark.) asserting six patents against a competitor and GE's offensive side of the multidistrict GE v. DR Systems PACS dispute.

Firm context. Pollock has been at Reed Smith since May 2010, joining as a partner in the IP group. He was previously an IP litigator at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan (Silicon Valley, from 2006) and before that an associate at Weil, Gotshal & Manges' Silicon Valley office.

Notable matters and PTAB/IPR experience. His most significant reported win is University of Florida Research Foundation v. General Electric (N.D. Fla.; Fed. Cir. No. 2018-1284, Feb. 26, 2019): dismissal at the pleading stage on § 101 grounds, affirmed by the Federal Circuit in a precedential opinion that also held a state entity waives Eleventh Amendment immunity to § 101 defenses by filing suit. He also lists University of Virginia Patent Foundation v. General Electric II (W.D. Va.), in which the asserted MRI pulse-sequence claims were invalidated across four IPRs with a Federal Circuit affirmance, and Adaptive Headlamp Technologies v. Volvo (D. Del.), where an NPE's headlight-control patent was invalidated by IPR and the case dismissed. IPR work is a core part of the practice rather than incidental: the firm states he has been lead counsel and obtained final written decisions of invalidity in numerous IPRs, USPTO/PTAB filings show him as GE's counsel in IPR2016-00357/-00358/-00359 (U.S. Pat. No. RE44,644) against the UVA Patent Foundation, and he has appeared pro hac vice in CBM proceedings. Note that the Federal Circuit affirmances beyond UFRF and the specific outcomes of the settlement-based matters (e.g., Affinity Labs, Signal IP) rest on firm-reported descriptions that I could not independently verify in this review.

Bar/education. Admitted to the California bar in 2001 (No. 217546; active, no discipline reported); registered to practice before the USPTO (Reg. No. 48977); admitted in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. B.S., Mechanical Engineering, University of Alberta (1991); J.D., Santa Clara University School of Law (2001). He is a named inventor on U.S. patents — 12 per a 2010 firm announcement, "over 20" per the current Reed Smith bio.

Disambiguation note: the David S. Pollock who was formerly a Reed Smith partner in Pittsburgh practices family law and is a different attorney; several other professionals named David Pollock (including a CB Financial Services director) are unrelated.