Sandra Nowak

Sandra Nowak — Patent Litigation / IP Practice Summary

Focus areas. Nowak's tracked patent litigation exposure is medical-device work: the sole matter in the dataset, Wound Healing Technologies Corp. v. Solventum Corp. (W.D. Tex. No. 6:24-cv-589), concerns negative-pressure wound therapy dressings (U.S. Patent No. 10,639,404). That is consistent with her broader portfolio profile, which spans chemistry and materials (BA in Chemistry), consumer products (Post-it, Scotch, Command brands), healthcare devices, and some software/artificial-intelligence filings — described in her own organization bios as a mix of patent preparation and prosecution, trademark, trade secret and domain-name litigation, and global IP agreements.

Side preference. The tracked record is one-sided: 0 plaintiff-side appearances and 1 defendant-side appearance. She appears as in-house counsel for the accused operating company, not as outside counsel for NPEs/PAEs. Her career framing is corporate IP ownership and defense — she has stated that she filed or prosecuted over 100 applications at 3M and managed litigation as a portfolio owner rather than as a repeat courtroom advocate, so the plaintiff/defendant skew should be read as a product of her in-house role, not as an NPE practice.

Firm / company context. She is Chief Intellectual Property Counsel at Solventum Corporation (St. Paul, MN), the healthcare company spun off from 3M in April 2024; she led the IP carve-out of roughly 14,000 IP assets across 140+ countries and heads a global IP team. Before the spin-off she spent nearly two decades at 3M (joined 2005), serving as Associate Chief IP Counsel for the Health Care Business Group and chief IP counsel for the Consumer Business Group. She began her legal career as an IP attorney at Stoel Rives LLP in Portland, Oregon.

Notable matters and PTAB. In Wound Healing Technologies, the W.D. Tex. court stayed the infringement action pending review, and Solventum petitioned for IPR (IPR2025-01042, filed June 13, 2025, outside counsel at Akin Gump). The PTAB instituted the IPR, finding a reasonable likelihood of prevailing on at least one challenged claim; third-party PTAB trackers list the proceeding as terminated following settlement, and the district case is docketed as closed — I could not verify the settlement terms from a primary source. She is the client-side IP lead on this defense but is not listed as counsel of record in the PTAB filings. She should not be described as a regular IPR practitioner on this record; there is no verified pattern of her personally appearing in PTAB proceedings.

Bar / education. JD, University of Oregon (2000); BA Chemistry, Franklin & Marshall College (1997); admitted Oregon (2000) and Minnesota (2007).

Caveat on sourcing. Public information about Nowak is mostly corporate-IP and diversity-in-innovation coverage (IPO, AIA, IPO Education Foundation, Minnesota Lawyer, IAM) rather than litigation reporting, and one magazine profile contains factual errors about Solventum's business. Her litigation results are therefore thinly documented; treat the counts above as a single-case sample, not a practice-wide pattern.