Thomas A. Franklin

I'll research this attorney's background and the tracked case before drafting.

Let me verify the IPR proceedings and their outcomes, plus confirm his role in them.

Thomas A. Franklin — Patent Litigation Practice Summary

Specialty / focus areas. Franklin's practice is centered on patent prosecution and portfolio counseling rather than litigation as a primary discipline, with electrical/computer and electromechanical technologies as his core. Wolf Greenfield's profile lists semiconductors, medical devices, electromagnetic sensors, optics, lighting circuitry and systems, MEMS, artificial intelligence, fluidic systems, and sports-related technology. His academic background is physics (BA, Bucknell) and electrical engineering/computer science (MS, MIT), and USPTO filing data cited by third-party trackers associates him most heavily with electronics and university/research filers such as Samsung, MIT, Sony, Harvard, MediaTek, and Butterfly Network. The one tracked litigation-adjacent matter involves data-storage encryption and key-management technology.

Side preference. The structured data shows one appearance, plaintiff side, zero defendant side — but that label needs context: his single tracked matter is the Google LLC v. Security First Innovations, LLC dispute, in which Google is the petitioner/challenging party, and he is listed as back-up counsel rather than lead. Firm-authored and firm-hosted descriptions say he provides "litigation-related counseling for both plaintiffs and defendants," so the honest characterization is a prosecution-and-counseling attorney who supports both sides but whose tracked contentious work sits on the petitioner/operating-company side. He is not a first-chair trial lawyer by public record.

Firm context. Franklin has been at Wolf, Greenfield & Sacks, P.C. (Boston) for roughly two decades and was promoted to shareholder effective January 1, 2016, alongside Y. Jenny Chen and Jessamine N. Lee. He is co-chair of the firm's Electrical & Computer Technologies practice group and has handled internal hiring and training for that group. No prior law firm or in-house employer was identified in the sources reviewed.

Notable tracked matter. The Google/Security First Innovations dispute is the one matter in which he appears. Google filed a series of IPRs against Security First Innovations (an NPE holding the former Security First Corp. storage-encryption portfolio) patents in November 2023 while Security First's infringement suit against Google over Google Cloud/Google Drive encryption-at-rest was pending in the E.D. Va. (2:23-cv-00097). The district court stayed that case pending IPR in January 2024 and, on December 10, 2024, denied Security First's motion to lift the stay as to the '140 patent. On the PTAB side, IPR2024-00213 ('140 patent) was denied institution on June 6, 2024, and rehearing was denied July 30, 2024 — a win for the patent owner, not for Franklin's client. IPR2024-00212, -00214, and -00215 were instituted and went to a consolidated oral hearing on February 27, 2025; final written decisions issued in the -00214 and -00215 proceedings in May 2025 and are reported as on appeal. I could not verify the substantive holdings of those final written decisions from the sources available, so the outcomes should be confirmed before relying on them. Separately, an IBM petition filed in 2025 (IPR2025-01202) asserts that claims in related patents in the same family "have been found invalid or were found to raise serious patentability issues," which suggests at least partial petitioner success, but I could not tie that statement to a specific final written decision.

PTAB / IPR experience. Yes — this is a genuine strength area. He is named back-up counsel on Wolf Greenfield's Google petitions (verified on the IPR2024-00213 petition caption, and in IPR2024-00215 filings as Reg. No. 63,456), and his firm bio states extensive experience in post-grant proceedings (IPR and re-exam). He is described as ranked among the top 5% of practitioners representing patent owners before the PTAB in Patexia's IPR Intelligence Report, and Wolf Greenfield has been ranked among the top US firms for post-grant proceedings by IAM Patent 1000. Lead counsel on the Google matters is Elisabeth H. Hunt, with Richard F. Giunta, Gregory S. Nieberg, and Nathan R. Speed also on the team.

Bar / education. Admitted in Massachusetts (2007); registered patent attorney, USPTO Reg. No. 63,456. Bucknell University (BA, Physics, magna cum laude); MIT (MS, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science); Boston College Law School (JD, magna cum laude; Order of the Coif, Phi Beta Kappa). Repeatedly listed in IAM Patent 1000 (Massachusetts, prosecution) and a former Massachusetts Rising Star (2014–2017).

Note on sourcing: career details come from Wolf Greenfield's own attorney page and press releases, IPWatchdog, Super Lawyers, and PatentBots/Patexia-derived data; PTAB facts come from PTAB filings and dockets and Lowenstein & Weatherwax's announcement of the non-institution. Some sources (Patexia rankings, third-party "IP Verse" case-status summaries) are aggregator data and should be spot-checked.