James Hurst

James Hurst is a distinguished trial lawyer at Kirkland & Ellis LLP, specializing in complex patent litigation. His practice focuses heavily on defending operating companies across diverse technological sectors, including life sciences, medical technologies, biosimilars, generic drugs, high-frequency trading systems utilizing FPGA hardware, and voice recognition/natural language understanding technologies. This defendant-side preference is consistent across his tracked appearances, where he has exclusively represented defendants in patent matters.

Throughout his career, Mr. Hurst has earned recognition for his trial acumen. He successfully argued a patent case 9-0 before the U.S. Supreme Court. Notably, he secured a defense verdict for Alere Inc. in a patent infringement suit and achieved a complete appellate court victory for Abbott in a long-running patent infringement dispute brought by Enzo Life Sciences. His notable tracked cases include defending Jump Trading LLC and Citadel Securities, LLC in patent disputes involving high-frequency trading technologies, as well as representing Samsung Electronics Co. in a case concerning VoiceBox NLU patents, which closed with a split dismissal following an apparent licensing resolution.

Before joining Kirkland & Ellis in late 2014, Mr. Hurst was a prominent figure at Winston & Strawn LLP, where he chaired the litigation department and previously led the intellectual property litigation department. While his extensive litigation experience includes intellectual property disputes, explicit details regarding his regular involvement in PTAB or IPR proceedings are not readily available in public records.

Mr. Hurst holds a J.D., cum laude, from the University of Pennsylvania Law School (1989) and a B.S., magna cum laude, from the University of Delaware (1986). He was admitted to the Illinois Bar in 1989.