Nicholas P. Bell

I'll research this attorney's professional background before drafting the summary.

Nicholas P. Bell — Alston & Bird LLP (patent prosecution and litigation)

Specialty / focus areas. Bell is a member of Alston & Bird's Intellectual Property Patent Prosecution Group, and his practice sits at the software/electrical/electronics intersection. According to his firm biography, he worked as a software engineer before law school, specializing in image-processing software (from surveillance applications to eye-tracking communication devices), and has design-and-development experience spanning low-level hardware through large-scale software applications. He applies that background to patent litigation and prosecution matters involving complex software, electrical, and electronics technologies. The one tracked litigation matter is a software/financial-services patent dispute (digital imaging and account-administration patents), consistent with that technical profile.

Side preference. The tracked data show a purely defense-side practice: 0 plaintiff-side appearances and 1 defendant-side appearance, as Supporting Counsel for Bank of America. That is a very small sample — a single matter — so it supports only the narrow observation that his tracked litigation work has been on the operating-company defense side, not that he is categorically defense-only. His separately described patent prosecution practice is by nature patent-owner oriented, so the overall picture is mixed rather than strictly one-sided.

Firm context. He is at Alston & Bird, the firm of record in his tracked case. The firm bio does not identify prior law-firm affiliations; the only prior professional role clearly sourced is his pre-law-school career as a software engineer.

Notable cases and outcomes. Intellectual Ventures I LLC v. Bank of America, N.A. et al., No. 3:13-cv-358 (W.D.N.C.) is the only tracked matter. He is listed as supporting counsel for the Bank of America defendants. Notable public outcomes in that litigation: the court granted Bank of America's motion to dismiss the induced- and contributory-infringement claims as to several asserted patents (Doc. 57, Mar. 4, 2014, adopting the magistrate's recommendation), and the PTAB later invalidated two IV patents under Alice in May 2015 in covered-business-method reviews. Those PTAB reviews were handled by separate counsel (Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr, per the CBM oral-hearing record), so the PTAB results should not be attributed to Bell.

PTAB / IPR experience. No IPR, PGR, or CBM appearances are attributable to Bell in the tracked data or in the PTAB records reviewed. The related CBMs in the Bank of America/IV litigation were argued by different firms. His USPTO-facing work, as described by the firm, appears to be patent prosecution rather than PTAB trial practice; PTAB experience therefore cannot be confirmed from available sources.

Bar / education. J.D., cum laude, Wake Forest University School of Law; M.S. and B.S. in electrical engineering, Brigham Young University. State bar admissions were not confirmed in the sources reviewed.

Caveats. The name is not distinctive, so identify the correct individual by firm and practice area; all litigation-specific statements here rest on a single tracked appearance, and no independent outcome data ties Bell personally to the verdicts or rulings in that case beyond his listed supporting role.