R.S. Johnson

Attorney summary — R.S. Johnson (R. Scott Johnson), Fredrikson & Byron

Practice focus and side. R. Scott Johnson is a shareholder in Fredrikson & Byron's Des Moines office and chairs the firm's Intellectual Property Litigation Group. His practice spans patent, trademark, copyright, and trade secret litigation and licensing, with prosecution experience in the mechanical and electrical arts (software and business-method filings included) across industries such as industrial manufacturing, agriculture, health care, consumer products, and power generation. His one tracked appearance, PacifiCorp et al. v. Birchtech Corp., is plaintiff/petitioner-side and is part of the coordinated PTAB and district-court campaign that utilities (PacifiCorp, Berkshire Hathaway Energy, MidAmerican, WEC) brought against Birchtech Corp. (f/k/a Midwest Energy Emissions Corp.) over mercury-emissions-capture patents for coal-fired plants. Web sources describe a genuinely two-sided trial practice — he has both enforced and defended patents — though his IAM Patent 1000 (2026) profile emphasizes "courtroom defense with an aggressive PTAB strategy to neutralise asserted patents," indicating substantial operating-company defense work despite the plaintiff-side tracked count.

Firm context and notable matters. Johnson joined Fredrikson in January 2020 after roughly 20 years at McKee, Voorhees & Sease in Des Moines, where he was a partner and executive committee member. Reported highlights include a first-chair defense verdict in OTR Wheel & Engineering v. West Worldwide Services (E.D. Wash.) invalidating all asserted IP, affirmed on appeal, and favorable pre-trial settlements in mechanical patent cases (Meridian Mfg. v. C&B Mfg., Roto-Mix v. Sioux Automation, Brandt v. Harvest Int'l) after Markman rulings. In the tracked PacifiCorp v. Birchtech matter, he is lead counsel for petitioners in a large IPR cluster (IPR2025-00274, -00278, -00280/81, -00422 through -00425, -00687/88, -00717/18). That campaign produced a notable January 2026 precedential Director Review decision vacating institution of parallel IPRs challenging the same claims — an adverse PTAB-economy ruling against his petitioner clients.

PTAB/IPR and credentials. Johnson is an active, high-volume PTAB practitioner (petitioner and patent-owner side; e.g., Tennant Co. v. Oxygenator Water Technologies). He holds a B.S. in aerospace engineering from Iowa State (1996), a J.D. with honors from Drake (1999), is admitted in Iowa and before the USPTO (Reg. No. 45,792) and the Federal Circuit, and is a Certified Licensing Professional. Note: Fredrikson also employs a Minneapolis civil litigator with the same initials (Ryan Steven Johnson), whose practice is not patent-focused; the IP/PTAB record above is R. Scott Johnson's.