James V. Suggs

Specialty / focus areas. James V. Suggs is a Chicago-based partner at McDonnell Boehnen Hulbert & Berghoff LLP (MBHB), where he co-chairs the firm's Chemical and Biotechnology & Pharmaceuticals practice groups. His practice centers on patent procurement, strategic counseling, freedom-to-operate, and due diligence across chemical, polymer, materials science, pharmaceutical, optical/photonic, and semiconductor technologies, with litigation experience in district court, Federal Circuit appeals, and the ITC, including ANDA (Hatch-Waxman) disputes, medical devices, and circuit-board cases (MBHB bio; MBHB press release, June 2026). He is a former Corning Incorporated patent agent and senior scientist and was previously on the research faculty at the Georgia Tech Research Institute; he is named on five issued U.S. patents.

Side preference. The one tracked litigation appearance — Excalibur IP, LLC v. Lyft, Inc. — was on the defendant side, with Suggs serving as lead counsel for operating company Lyft against a patent-assertion entity (Excalibur IP is the former Yahoo!/Altaba patent monetization vehicle). His broader practice, however, is not one-sided: he prosecutes and counsels for large multinationals, startups, and universities, and his PTAB appearances include work for both patent owners and petitioners.

Notable cases / PTAB experience. Beyond the tracked Lyft matter, Suggs has appeared in Trading Technologies Int'l, Inc. v. Rosenthal Collins Group, LLC (N.D. Ill., 1:10-cv-00929) and in multiple IPRs — including IPR2016-01528 (backup counsel for patent owner) and IPR2017-00543 (backup counsel for petitioner) — consistent with his described "active inter partes review practice." I could not verify the outcome or docket posture of Excalibur IP v. Lyft through web-accessible sources, so no result is reported for it.

Bar / education. Suggs's USPTO registration (No. 50419) and Corning/Georgia Tech background are documented, but his state bar admissions and degree-granting institutions are not clearly identified in the sources located; I have omitted that line rather than risk inaccuracy.