Bainbridge Mims Rogers & Smith

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Bainbridge, Mims, Rogers & Smith LLP — Patent Litigation Practice Summary

Firm overview. Bainbridge, Mims, Rogers & Smith LLP is a small, single-office general commercial litigation and business firm headquartered at the Luckie Building, 600 Luckie Drive, Suite 415, Birmingham, Alabama. Founded in 1942, it has no other offices. Martindale-Hubbell lists six attorneys in the Birmingham office, and third-party business data aggregators place headcount at roughly 11–20 employees with estimated revenue in the $1–5 million range — placing it well outside BigLaw and outside the AmLaw 200. It is not an IP boutique. Chambers USA (Alabama) ranks the firm in Litigation: General Commercial and Litigation: Appellate, and its own practice description emphasizes commercial litigation, business disputes, environmental and toxic tort litigation, class actions, construction, insurance, banking/finance and securities litigation, eminent domain, and estates and trusts. No patent- or IP-specific practice group appears in the firm's own practice listings.

IP litigation specialty. There is no documented technology-specific IP specialty. The firm's own website does not advertise patent litigation, and no IP practice page or IP-focused attorney bio was located. Its only tracked patent matter, Intellectual Ventures II LLC v. BBVA Compass Bancshares, Inc., concerned financial-services/online-banking patents (e.g., U.S. Patent Nos. 5,745,574, 6,314,409, and 6,826,694 covering access control, digital-property distribution, and high-resolution access control). The technology mix in that case reflects the client's portfolio rather than any firm-level technical focus. Counsel should treat the firm as a local-counsel resource rather than as a source of substantive patent expertise.

Side preference. The structured appearance data shows one tracked case and one side: plaintiff, with zero defendant-side appearances. That single appearance came as local counsel (the only role of record, listed twice — once for each tracked attorney), not as lead patent counsel. The plaintiff was Intellectual Ventures II LLC, an entity the Stanford NPE Litigation Database classifies as a patent asserter relying on acquired patents. One plaintiff-side local-counsel engagement for an NPE is not sufficient to characterize the firm as an NPE/PAE shop, and it should not be read as a plaintiff-side or patent-holder orientation in any broader sense.

Notable cases and outcomes. The single tracked matter, Intellectual Ventures II LLC v. BBVA Compass Bancshares, Inc. et al., No. 2:13-cv-01106 (N.D. Ala., filed June 12, 2013), is notable mainly for its outcome and is not a favorable result for the client the firm assisted. A.H. "Nick" Gaede, Jr. and Jennifer A. Hanson appeared for IV in the Northern District of Alabama. IV's lead patent counsel was out-of-state and admitted pro hac vice (Peter Mikhail, Lawrence McDonough, Nikolas Bohl, among others). The district court cases were stayed in view of inter partes review, and in September 2018 Jones Day announced it obtained dismissal with prejudice of all of Intellectual Ventures' claims on behalf of Compass Bank. No verdict, Federal Circuit decision, or public settlement attributable to this firm in a patent matter was located.

PTAB / IPR practice. None is attributable to the firm. In the related PTAB proceedings, the petitions against IV's patents were filed by the bank defendants (e.g., Compass Bank, Commerce Bancshares, and First National Bank of Omaha in IPR2014-00660, -00722, and -00724), and IV's patent-owner responses were handled by Knobbe, Martens, Olson & Bear LLP. No public record shows Bainbridge, Mims, Rogers & Smith filing an IPR or PGR petition or serving as PTAB counsel in any matter. Any statement of a firm IPR filing volume would be unsupported.

Key partners / practice leaders. For patent work specifically: A.H. "Nick" Gaede, Jr. (the attorney of record for the plaintiff in the tracked case, but whose publicly listed practices are alternative dispute resolution, construction litigation, and international arbitration — he is a past president of the American College of Construction Lawyers, not an IP practitioner) and Jennifer A. Hanson (business/commercial litigation; listed as an associate in some directories and a partner in others — treat her title as unverified). The firm's more prominent litigators by peer ranking are Bruce F. Rogers (Chambers USA "Leading Lawyer," Best Lawyers in Bet-the-Company, Commercial, Banking and Finance, and Securities Litigation) and Alfred F. "Buddy" Smith, Jr. (Best Lawyers in Environmental Law, Environmental Litigation, and Mass Tort/Class Actions - Defendants, also Chambers-featured). None of these four is identified in any ranking or firm publication as an intellectual property or patent litigation practitioner. Note also that some directory listings for the firm's non-IP attorneys may be dated, as attorney rosters appear to have changed in recent years.