Phillip Morton

Phillip Morton — Patent Litigation Practice Summary

Phillip Morton is a Washington, DC–based partner in Cooley LLP's Intellectual Property group whose practice focuses on patent litigation and counseling across a wide range of technologies — software, wireless communications, video compression and coding, computer hardware, wearables, video games, social media, and consumer electronics (per his Cooley bio). His one tracked appearance, Unified Patents v. Surrozen Operating Inc., extends that range to biopharma: he represents Surrozen, a Wnt-pathway antibody therapeutics company, as defendant against an IPR petition filed by Unified Patents, the patent-validity challenger. He also has substantial experience as local counsel in the Eastern District of Virginia "rocket docket" and before the ITC and Federal Circuit.

On the tracked case list he is entirely defendant-side (1–0), and his verifiable district-court work is defense of operating companies — most prominently Corephotonics, Ltd. v. Apple Inc. (N.D. Cal.), where he served as Cooley counsel for Apple; the IPRs he ran in that dispute were instituted on all asserted claims of three of the five patents-in-suit, and IPR2018-01146 ended in an adverse judgment on U.S. Patent No. 9,568,712. In PTAB proceedings he also appears on the petitioner side (ServiceNow, Motorola Mobility, Meta Platforms), so his IPR practice spans both roles even though his district-court docket skews to defendants. He has spent his patent career at Cooley, with earlier experience as a summer associate at Banner & Witcoff and at the FCC's commercial wireless division; before law school he worked in Motorola's wireless and networking divisions.

Morton appears regularly before the PTAB, serving as lead or back-up counsel in IPRs on both sides — patent owner (Ouster in Hesai Technology v. Ouster, IPR2023-01422; Surrozen) and petitioner (Meta Platforms, IPR2024-00249) — consistent with his bio's listing of IPR, CBM, and reexamination experience. He is registered to practice before the USPTO (Reg. No. 57,835) and admitted in Virginia and DC, with court admissions including the Federal Circuit and the Eastern District of Virginia; he holds a JD from George Washington University Law School (2005, with honors) and a BS in electrical engineering from Arizona State University (2001, magna cum laude). Legal 500 recognizes him in IP patent litigation. The specific docket and outcome of the Surrozen matter could not be independently verified in this search; the profile above relies on his Cooley bio, court filings, and PTAB power-of-attorney records.