Michael A. Hawes

Michael A. Hawes — Baker Botts LLP (Houston)

Focus areas. Hawes is a patent litigator and appellate specialist rather than a single-technology practitioner. His published case list skews heavily to electrical engineering, telecom, and computer technologies — cellular/wireless (beamforming, error-correction circuits, QoS traffic protocols), networking and satellite transmission, flash memory and semiconductor packaging, power conversion, optical cable, digital rights management and media security, financial-data compression, and DNA sequencing — alongside some life-sciences and mechanical work (cancer treatment technologies, PET imaging, chemical application, hydrocarbon connectors, vacuum/ITC matters). His background is a B.S. in electrical engineering (Rice), and firm/press descriptions emphasize software and computer networking as his core technical comfort zone. He also handles copyright, trade secret, and employee-mobility/IP-agreement disputes, so he is not exclusively a patent lawyer.

Side preference. The tracked docket in this dataset shows a single appearance, on the defendant side (1 defense, 0 plaintiff). That aligns with his firm biography, which is overwhelmingly a defense roster of operating companies — AT&T/AT&T Mobility, Dell, Samsung, Ericsson, Kioxia, Toshiba, Hughes Network Systems, ON Semiconductor, Comcast, Baylor College of Medicine, the CME/NYMEX/CBOT exchanges and others — plus some ITC work (Bissell). One peer-review writeup does note he is "adept at plaintiff and the defence side of patent disputes," so he is not purely a defense lawyer, but the sourced record describes him as defending operating companies rather than asserting for NPEs/PAEs.

Firm context and notable matters. He is a partner at Baker Botts and chairs the firm's firmwide Federal Circuit Appellate Practice Group; no prior-firm history was surfaced in the sources reviewed. IAM's Patent 1000 credits him as part of the Baker Botts team that obtained a favorable result for AT&T in Finesse Wireless (cellular technology). His most prominent reported work is appellate: principal counsel in 60–100+ Federal Circuit appeals and mandamus proceedings, including venue-transfer mandamus for Fusion-io, appeals and mandamus petitions for ON Semiconductor, an argued appeal of an inter partes reexamination for BASF, an appeal from an ITC vacuum-technology proceeding for Bissell, and a patent/Walker Process antitrust appeal for Hydril. Separately, the tracked case here — Alpha Modus Corp. v. The Home Depot, Inc., with Hawes as lead counsel for Home Depot — places him on the defense side of Alpha Modus's AI/computer-vision retail-analytics patent campaign (a multi-defendant assertion effort also targeting Lowe's, 7-Eleven, Zara, H&M, Circle K and others). I could not verify a public outcome, ruling, or settlement in the Home Depot matter from available sources, so no result should be assumed.

PTAB/IPR. His federal-circuit profile shows him arguing appeals from Patent Office proceedings (including inter partes reexamination) and handling appeals arising out of IPRs, but I found no reliable indication that he is a regular first-chair PTAB practitioner — no IPR/PGR filings are reflected in the tracked case list, and his public profile emphasizes court-based appellate work.

Bar/education. Admitted in Texas, the U.S. Supreme Court, the Federal Circuit and Ninth Circuit, and before the USPTO; J.D., Harvard Law School (1998, magna cum laude); B.S., Electrical Engineering, Rice University (1993); former law clerk to Judge William C. Bryson, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Recognized in Chambers USA (Intellectual Property: Appellate) and IAM Patent 1000.