Thomas N. Millikan

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Thomas N. Millikan — Patent Litigation Practice Summary

Specialty / focus. Millikan is a first-chair patent trial lawyer concentrated in electrical-engineering and computer-science technologies: video and audio compression, streaming media, telecommunications and consumer electronics, semiconductor design, and cloud/network security (cloud access security brokers, data loss prevention). A substantial share of his recent work is standard-essential patent (SEP) and FRAND licensing disputes over video-codec portfolios, including coordinated multi-jurisdictional campaigns in the U.S., UK, Germany, India, Brazil, and the UPC. He litigates in federal district courts, the ITC (Section 337), and the PTAB. Background is technical rather than generalist: he was a digital signal processing engineer at Texas Instruments (software/systems for MP3 players, mobile phones, GPS, video players) and is a named inventor on roughly a dozen patents.

Side preference. The tracked record is exclusively plaintiff-side — 3 of 3 appearances, all at Perkins Coie, two as lead counsel — and it is dominated by Netskope, Inc.'s assertion campaign against Fortinet. That sample is small, however, and it does not mean an NPE/PAE practice: his client in the tracked matters is an operating company, and his broader docket includes implementer/defense-side SEP work for Amazon against Nokia and InterDigital (including two ITC trials). Firm announcements describe him as having obtained favorable settlements "for both plaintiffs and defendants." Treat him as an asserting-side trial lawyer in the tracked record with meaningful defense-side SEP experience — not as a one-sided NPE specialist.

Firm context and credentials. All three tracked matters were handled at Perkins Coie (San Diego), where he became a partner in February 2014; before that he was a partner at Fish & Richardson following a roughly two-year stint at a boutique IP firm. In spring 2026 he moved, with a 15-lawyer IP litigation team (Ascarrunz, Brewer, Klein, Millikan, Reid), to Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton ("Sheppard"), based in Del Mar, California; post-move filings in the Netskope v. Fortinet district case are signed under Sheppard. J.D., University of Texas School of Law (2004, with honors); B.S. Electrical Engineering, University of Cincinnati (1999, cum laude); admitted in California, Ohio, Texas, and before the USPTO (Reg. No. 72,316; Cal. Bar No. 234430 — useful identifiers given the common name).

Notable matters and PTAB experience. He is lead counsel for Netskope in Netskope, Inc. v. Fortinet, Inc. (N.D. Cal., Judge Haywood Gilliam), a network-security patent suit involving claim construction, case narrowing, and amended infringement contentions. In Netskope v. Fortinet IPR2023-00030 he was petitioner's lead counsel, and the Board's April 2024 final written decision found all challenged claims of Fortinet's '941 patent unpatentable; Fortinet sought Director Review, arguing the Board departed from the petition and formulated its own obviousness theory. He also appears as petitioner's counsel in Netskope v. Bitglass (IPR2021-01045 / PGR2021-00091) and H-E-B v. Digital Retail Apps (IPR2020-00347/48), and on the patent-owner side for Netskope in Fortinet v. Netskope IPR2026-00031 (institution discretionarily denied, February 2026), plus PTAB filings naming him as counsel for Verance Corporation in audio-watermarking matters. He is a regular PTAB practitioner — recognized in Patexia's Top 250 PTAB list (2024) and as a "Top 100" petitioner-side attorney in its 2019 IPR Intelligence Report. One caveat: firm bios state he originated winning liability defenses for a software company in trials named among IP Law & Business's "Top 10 Litigation Wins" of 2008, but I could not independently verify the case name. The tracked list also includes one uncaptioned plaintiff-side Perkins Coie matter in which he was lead counsel; no public details were available for it.