Heather E. Takahashi

Heather E. Takahashi — Patent Litigation Practice Summary

Heather E. Takahashi is a partner at Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP (Los Angeles), where she has spent her entire private-practice career (associate from 2007, partner from roughly 2016) after a 2006–07 clerkship with Judge Richard J. Holwell (S.D.N.Y.). All three of her tracked appearances — Sandpiper CDN, LLC v. Google LLC, Google LLC v. Sandpiper CDN, LLC, and Advanced Cluster Systems, Inc. v. Intel Corporation — are on the defendant side, and her practice is consistently devoted to defending operating companies (Google, Intel, Dell, Rambus, Harman) against NPE/PAE assertions; nothing in her public record reflects plaintiff-side or NPE prosecution work. Note: one tracked appearance (Advanced Cluster Systems) is attributed internally to Morrison & Foerster, but I could not verify any MoFo tenure in public sources — dockets and her MTO bio uniformly show Munger Tolles as counsel of record, so that attribution should be treated cautiously.

Her technology range spans software/electronics and life sciences: Wi-Fi 5/6 standard-essential patents, video compression standards, DRAM, programmable logic devices, tap-and-pay payment technology, cluster-computing processor architecture, and Hatch-Waxman pharmaceutical litigation. She is a registered patent attorney with a molecular-biology master's from Johns Hopkins (Columbia Law J.D. 2006; B.S., Brigham Young), which underpins her work on both technical patent portfolios and drug cases. She has litigated in district courts in California, Texas, Delaware, and elsewhere, and before the Federal Circuit (including an amicus brief in UC v. Broad Institute for the CRISPR dispute).

Notable tracked matters: she is lead counsel for Google in Sandpiper CDN (W.D. Tex.), where her firm obtained dismissal and sanctions against the NPE; the companion Google v. Sandpiper CDN action is the related declaratory/counterclaim posture. She represents Intel in Advanced Cluster Systems (W.D. Tex., Xeon/Habana cluster-computing patents), a still-pending case in which Intel also pursued IPRs. Her other verifiable results include a Takeda judgment of infringement and validity against three generic makers of Dexilant®, favorable settlements over Colcrys®, and defense of AbbVie's Humira® in D. Mass.

Takahashi appears regularly before the PTAB in IPRs on both sides — as petitioner's lead counsel for Intel (e.g., IPR2023-00864, where institution was granted on all challenged claims before settlement, per her firm bio) and Google, and as patent-owner lead counsel for Yangtze Memory in IPR2024-00791/00792 (2025). She is a member of the PTAB Bar Association and Federal Circuit Bar Association. California bar (SBN 245845); USPTO Reg. No. 78,418. Sources: Munger Tolles bio, Law360 attorney profile, court dockets (Unified Patents, CourtListener, Docket Alarm).