James L. Day

Summary — James L. Day (Farella Braun + Martel LLP)

James L. Day is a patent litigation partner at Farella Braun + Martel LLP in San Francisco and head of the firm's Patent Office Litigation practice. He focuses on patent disputes in federal district courts and before the PTAB, plus trade secret litigation, for internet and high-technology clients. His technical portfolio spans cable networks, disk drives, video networking, software-defined networking and data center systems, electronic locks, and pharmaceuticals. He is an electrical engineer (UC Davis, B.S. EE/CS) with prior software industry experience, and he is a registered patent attorney — a background the firm cites as central to his trial and PTAB work.

Day works almost exclusively on the defense side, representing operating companies accused by NPEs/PAEs. His Law360 track record (46 appearances) is dominated by defendants such as Cloudflare, Adobe, Comcast, and Perplexity AI, and his tracked appearance in Dell Technologies v. Cloud Byte LLC fits that pattern: he is lead counsel for Dell against NPE Cloud Byte (E.D. Tex. No. 2:24-cv-00637-JRG, Judge Gilstrap), coordinating the district court defense with a series of Dell-filed IPRs. He has also handled plaintiff-side patent work for patent owners (e.g., UC Regents in UC Regents v. QD Vision), but his practice is primarily defense of accused infringers. The single tracked appearance is as lead plaintiff-side counsel for Dell — an operating company pursuing invalidity relief against a patent holder.

PTAB/IPR work is a defining part of his practice. He leads Farella's Patent Office Litigation group and was named a 2023 National Law Journal IP Trailblazer for coordinating district court and PTAB strategy, including IPRs that canceled over 100 asserted patent claims for a client. Notable results include Security People, Inc. v. Ojmar US, LLC, where he obtained dismissal of two suits, defeated a third via an IPR summarily affirmed by the Federal Circuit, and then pursued a Walker Process antitrust claim that settled before trial (2018); and Comcast v. Promptu Systems, where all six IPRs he filed were instituted. In the current Dell/Cloud Byte matter, one of the Dell IPRs (IPR2025-01287) was denied under the Director's discretionary review in November 2025.

He joined Farella in January 2015 after 16 years at Latham & Watkins (San Francisco), where he built his patent litigation practice. He holds a J.D. magna cum laude from UC Hastings (1998), is admitted to the California bar (1998), the Federal Circuit, and the USPTO (Reg. No. 72,681), and has been recognized by Managing IP as an IP Star (Patent Litigation) since 2018 and by the Daily Journal as a Top IP Lawyer (2020, 2023).