Joseph J. DeMott

Joseph J. DeMott — patent litigation summary (prepared Sept. 16, 2026)

Focus and role. DeMott is an appellate lawyer at Clement & Murphy, PLLC (Alexandria, VA), not a first-chair district court patent trial lawyer. His tracked patent work is concentrated in network-security litigation: packet filtering, rule-set swapping, encrypted-traffic threat detection, and packet correlation — i.e., the Centripetal Networks portfolio asserted against Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, and Keysight. His patent appearances are Federal Circuit brief-writing roles (he is listed as counsel on the briefs in the Centripetal appeals; Paul Clement and Matthew Rowen handled oral argument). The firm's own bio describes his practice more broadly as complex federal litigation and appeals, with intellectual property as one subject among many; the two "untitled" entries in the tracked data could not be identified from public dockets, so no technology area is attributed to them.

Side preference. The tracked data shows 5 plaintiff-side and 0 defendant-side appearances, and all five are attributable to a single client relationship (Centripetal Networks) or unidentified matters. That is a small, non-representative sample from an appellate boutique whose patent docket is driven by one repeat patent-owner client; it should not be read as a general practice of representing NPEs/PAEs, and there is no public record of him defending operating companies in patent cases. His broader appellate practice includes plaintiffs'-side constitutional and administrative challenges (e.g., NetChoice's suits against state e-commerce laws).

Notable matters. (1) Centripetal Networks, LLC v. Palo Alto Networks, Inc., No. 23-2027 (Fed. Cir. Oct. 22, 2025) (precedential) — DeMott on the appellant's brief; the court vacated the PTAB's obviousness holding on U.S. Patent No. 9,917,856 for failing to adequately weigh Centripetal's copying evidence, but rejected the challenge to the APJ recusal analysis. (2) Centripetal Networks, LLC v. Cisco Systems, Inc., No. 24-2097 (Fed. Cir. Apr. 29, 2026) (nonprecedential) — DeMott on the appellant's brief; the court affirmed the district court's judgment of noninfringement on the '193, '806, and '176 patents, following the earlier Federal Circuit vacatur of the original willful-infringement judgment on judicial-recusal grounds (Centripetal Networks, Inc. v. Cisco Sys., Inc., 38 F.4th 1025 (Fed. Cir. 2022) — his involvement in that first appeal is not confirmed).

PTAB / IPR. His PTAB exposure appears to be at the appellate stage — briefing the appeals from the Board's final written decisions in IPR2022-00182, IPR2022-01151, and IPR2022-01199 — rather than as counsel of record in Board proceedings. No direct PTAB appearance was located.

Bar / education. J.D., Stanford Law School (Stanford Law Review; Supreme Court Litigation Clinic); law clerk to Judge Judith W. Rogers, D.C. Circuit; three and a half years in the DOJ Civil Division; admitted in Virginia (2018) and the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.