Ian Nathaniel Koster

Ian Nathaniel Koster is an associate in the San Francisco office of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, LLP, specializing in intellectual property litigation, which he joined in 2024. His practice primarily focuses on plaintiff-side patent enforcement, as evidenced by his appearances on behalf of patent assertion entities (PAEs). His technical background includes a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Purdue University, providing a foundation for handling complex technology cases.

Koster has been active as counsel for Cloud Byte LLC in Cloud Byte LLC v. Dell Inc. et al. (E.D. Tex. Case No. 2:24-cv-00637). In this notable litigation, Cloud Byte LLC has asserted seven patents related to a broad range of networking products, including ethernet switches, edge networking products, Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) technology, servers supporting high availability or fault tolerance features, abnormality detection, and advanced temperature control systems, against Dell.

While Koster is counsel in the district court proceedings, patents asserted by Cloud Byte LLC have also faced challenges at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB). Dell Technologies Inc. et al. filed an inter partes review (IPR2025-01286) against Cloud Byte LLC in July 2025, and Unified Patents initiated an ex parte reexamination of one of Cloud Byte's patents in December 2024. Prior to joining Quinn Emanuel, Koster gained experience with patent cases as an intern for Judge Alan D. Albright in the Federal District Court for the Western District of Texas, where he researched and drafted court orders. He earned his J.D., with honors, from The University of Texas School of Law in 2024, serving as Articles Editor for both the Texas Intellectual Property Law Journal and the Journal of Law and Technology at Texas. He is admitted to the State Bar of California.