Erik John Carlson

Erik J. Carlson is a patent litigation partner at Alston & Bird, where he joined in May 2024. With nearly 15 years of experience, he focuses his practice on high-stakes patent litigation across diverse complex technologies, including medical devices (such as spinal surgery systems), high-tech fields like natural language processing, artificial intelligence, telecommunications, cryptography, and cloud computing. His engineering background, including prior work as an aerospace engineer, informs his deep technical understanding in these areas.

Mr. Carlson demonstrates a balanced practice, representing both patent rights owners (plaintiffs) and defendants. His experience includes leading patent enforcement campaigns for pioneers in natural language processing and AI against major smartphone makers, and successfully representing medical device companies and startups in litigation. On the defense side, he has successfully invalidated patents for clients, including an insurance company against a patent assertion entity on Section 101 grounds, and obtained summary judgment for a manufacturing company by invalidating patents as obvious. His tracked appearances include serving as lead counsel for plaintiff VB Assets, LLC in a patent infringement case against Ford Motor Company, which involved computer voice recognition systems.

In addition to U.S. district courts, Mr. Carlson has experience representing clients before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the International Trade Commission (ITC), and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. He is admitted to the California Bar and registered to practice before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. He earned his J.D. from Loyola Law School in 2009, following an M.Eng. (2003) and B.S. (2002) from Cornell University.