Patrick J. Ickes

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

Patrick J. Ickes — Associate General Counsel, First National Bank of Omaha (Omaha, NE)

Focus areas. Ickes's only tracked patent appearance is as an in-house defendant in Intellectual Ventures II LLC v. First National Bank of Omaha, No. 8:13-cv-00167 (D. Neb., filed May 29, 2013). That suit was one of IV's coordinated campaigns against regional banks and asserted network-security and data-protection patents — including U.S. Patents 5,745,574, 6,314,409, 6,715,084 (network intrusion detection/firewall), 6,826,694 (packet filtering) and 7,634,666 (encryption). So the technology he has been exposed to on the public record is computer-network security and cryptography as deployed in banking, not Wi-Fi standards, pharma or mechanical arts. His bar listing describes a much broader in-house practice — Banking, Civil Litigation, Corporate Counsel, Data/Privacy/Technology, Federal Practice, and Intellectual Property — so patent work appears to be one component of a generalist corporate/banking legal function rather than a standalone patent specialty.

Side preference. The data show a one-sided profile: 0 plaintiff-side and 1 defendant-side appearance, in the in-house role. He has been on the defense side of NPE/PAE assertion activity against an operating company, which is consistent with a corporate counsel defending the bank and its vendors rather than prosecuting or monetizing patents.

Firm context. He is Associate General Counsel at First National Bank of Omaha (the principal banking subsidiary of First National of Nebraska), based in Omaha. Searches did not surface a prior law-firm patent litigation practice; public profiles place him in-house at FNBO/First National of Nebraska, and nothing in the record indicates a private-practice patent litigation career.

Notable matters and outcomes. In the Intellectual Ventures II matter, FNBO joined Commerce Bancshares and Compass Bank in filing IPRs on the asserted patents (IPR2014-00719, -00722, -00724 and -00801 at the PTAB). The Board found the firewall-related '084 claims unpatentable, and the Federal Circuit affirmed in Intellectual Ventures II LLC v. Commerce Bancshares, Inc., Nos. 2016-1519, -1520, -1528 (Fed. Cir. Mar. 27, 2017), a decision widely reported as a significant blow to IV's financial-services campaign. The Nebraska district court case was terminated March 11, 2019. One caveat: the PTAB and Federal Circuit papers list outside counsel (Kutak Rock, Senniger Powers, Jones Day) as counsel of record, and I found no filing naming Ickes personally — his participation is best characterized as in-house supervision/coordination of the defense and the parallel post-grant challenges rather than as lead trial counsel.

PTAB / IPR experience. The IPRs tied to his case were filed by the bank petitioners and include an institution decision (IPR2014-00801) and a Federal Circuit affirmance, but the public filings do not show Ickes as counsel of record in those proceedings, so regular personal IPR/PGR practice cannot be confirmed.

Bar / education. Admitted in Ohio (1995) and Nebraska (1997); J.D., Ohio Northern University (1995); B.S., Iowa State University (1988), per Martindale-Hubbell and the Nebraska State Bar Association listing.