Steven C. Sereboff

I'll research this attorney before drafting.

Let me verify the tracked case and look for litigation history.

Let me check counsel in the tracked Sampo case and the Applications in Internet Time matter.

Steven C. Sereboff — Patent Litigation Practice Summary

Focus areas. Sereboff's practice sits at the intersection of electrical-engineering patent prosecution and IP strategy, with litigation, licensing, and post-grant work layered on top. His technical background is computers (hardware and software), electronics, and electrical devices, and his USPTO prosecution docket has skewed toward RF/acoustic-wave filter technology (Resonant Inc.), enterprise and consumer software, gaming and VR (Zwift, Build a Rocket Boy Games, HypeVR), AI/semiconductor processing (Eta Compute), medical devices (Cure Medical, Sanisure), and optical technology (Indizen Optical Technologies). His litigation exposure is correspondingly software- and electronics-centric rather than pharma or mechanical-heavy; the one mechanical/filtration matter that surfaces in district court is Meissner Filtration Products v. Sani-Tech West (C.D. Cal.), where he appeared for the defendant.

Side preference. The tracked data reflects a single plaintiff-side appearance and no defendant-side appearances, but the broader public record shows a genuinely mixed practice rather than an NPE-only shop. His most thoroughly documented litigation role is on the patent-owner/monetization side: SoCal IP represented patent owner Applications in Internet Time, LLC ("AIT") in the Salesforce IPR proceedings and on appeal, and he appeared for patent owner TraceBeam, LLC in IPR2015-01700. At the same time, he has answered and defended in district court for accused operating companies, including Sani-Tech West, which is consistent with the firm's stated "both sides" positioning. The 1–0 plaintiff count in the tracked list should therefore be read as a small-sample artifact, not as evidence of a one-sided practice.

Firm context and notable matters. He is a member of SoCal IP Law Group LLP (Westlake Village and Santa Barbara, California), where he has practiced since at least the mid-2000s; an earlier affiliation is reported with Koppel, Jacobs, Patrick & Heybel of Thousand Oaks, quoted in an Orange County Business Journal piece on encryption-software litigation. His most notable work is the Applications in Internet Time v. Salesforce.com / RPX line: he argued for AIT before the Federal Circuit in Applications in Internet Time, LLC v. RPX Corp., No. 17-1698 (Fed. Cir. 2018), the decision addressing real-party-in-interest and privity under 35 U.S.C. § 315(b), and his firm also handled the related Supreme Court cert-stage filings. The firm has also filed amicus briefs in several significant patent cases, including Akamai v. Limelight, Therasense, Phoenix Solutions v. DirecTV, In re Bilski, In re Seagate, Philips v. AWH, and Knorr Bremse v. Dana.

PTAB / IPR experience. He appears regularly in AIA post-grant proceedings, predominantly on the patent-owner side. Verified appearances include IPR2015-01700 (TraceBeam, backup counsel), IPR2015-01750 and IPR2015-01752 (AIT), and IPR2019-01230, where he was substituted in as lead counsel for the patent owner after prior counsel withdrew. He is also associated with SoCal IP's 2009 "patent assassins" reexamination campaign, which used post-grant challenges offensively against asserted patents — an unusual, publicly reported posture worth noting when assessing him against an NPE-defense profile.

Bar and education. Admitted in California (1991) and registered before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (Reg. No. 37,035); also admitted in the District of Columbia in 1993, though his D.C. license is listed as administratively suspended for non-payment of dues. B.S.E.E., University of Maryland (1986); J.D., Boston University (1991).

Two verification caveats. First, the tracked case Sampo IP LLC v. Salesforce.com corresponds to Sampo IP, LLC v. Blackboard, Inc. et al., No. 2:13-cv-00601 (E.D. Va.) — a Marathon Patent Group NPE suit naming Salesforce.com as a defendant. The public docket for that case lists Sampo's counsel as Eric Berger, Robert Whitman, Mark S. Raskin, John F. Petrsoric, Jason LaBerteaux, Sachin K. Gupta, and local counsel C. Matthew Haynes, and does not show Sereboff or SoCal IP. His verifiable Salesforce-related litigation is Applications in Internet Time, not the Sampo matter, so the tracked entry should be confirmed against the firm's own records before it is relied on. Second, a filing in a Nevada district court action (No. 3:13-cv-00628) lists him appearing pro hac vice with SoCal IP in litigation involving Salesforce, but the retrieved excerpt does not cleanly resolve which party he represented; I have not treated it as confirmation of defense-side Salesforce work.