Bakewell & Kerr

I'll verify what I can about this firm and its tracked case before writing.

Let me dig further — this appears to be a historical firm, and I want to confirm before drawing conclusions.

Practice Summary: Bakewell & Kerr

Firm overview. Bakewell & Kerr was a 19th-century American patent-law partnership, not a contemporary firm. Contemporary directory listings place it at No. 94 Diamond Street, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, styled "Attorneys & Counsellors at Law in Patent Cases." Its founder, William Bakewell (b. 1823, England; d. Nov. 8, 1900), was admitted to the Allegheny County bar in 1845 and is consistently described in Pennsylvania legal histories as the first attorney to practice patent law west of the Allegheny Mountains. Thomas B. Kerr (Thomas Bakewell Kerr, b. 1849) was the junior named partner. There is no AmLaw, Chambers, Vault, or Law360 ranking for this practice, and none should be inferred — those directories did not exist on a comparable basis during its period of operation, and the firm is not a currently operating entity. The firm's lineal successor is The Webb Law Firm of Pittsburgh, which traces its roots to Bakewell's 1845 practice and retained "Bakewell" in the firm name until 1925; that lineage is sourced to Webb's own firm history and third-party firm profiles, not to a court record.

IP litigation specialty. The practice was built on mechanical and industrial-arts patents, consistent with Pittsburgh's iron, steel, glass, and machinery economy. The tracked matter, J. B. Sheriff & Son v. A. Fulton's Son & Co., 12 F. 136 (C.C.W.D. Pa. 1882), is an infringement and injunction suit on a reissued patent (No. 9,199) covering an improved steam siphon pump / ejector — a purely mechanical case turning on claim construction and the validity of broadening reissue claims. Contemporary records show the firm also litigating in related ejector technology (Scaife v. Fulton, 21 F. Cas. 616 (C.C.E.D. Pa. 1876)) and in steam-brake and steel-making patent disputes. There is no evidentiary basis for attributing any pharma, software, semiconductor, or standards-essential (e.g., Wi-Fi/FRAND) capability to this practice; those categories are anachronistic or outside the record.

Side preference. The structured case list shows 1 plaintiff-side appearance and 0 defendant-side appearances, giving an apparent plaintiff lean — but this is a single tracked matter and a misleading basis for a side preference. Contemporaneous reporters show the same lawyers appearing on both sides: Bakewell & Kerr is recorded as counsel for defendants in McNish v. Everson, Macrum & Co., 2 F. 899 (C.C.W.D. Pa. 1880), and William Bakewell and T. B. Kerr appeared for the defendants in Scaife v. Fulton (1876). The pattern is that of a general patent-boutique practice taking whichever side the client retained it on, with no indication of a plaintiff-only or NPE/PAE-style enforcement model. (Monetization entities of that type are a late-20th-century phenomenon and not applicable here.)

Notable cases and outcomes. The most prominent verifiable engagement is the firm's early representation of George Westinghouse, including work that produced Westinghouse's 1871 steam-power-brake patent and the pressing Gardner and Ranson air-brake litigation, which the firm's own contemporaneous account describes as being prosecuted with the client demanding maximum speed. J. B. Sheriff & Son v. A. Fulton's Son & Co. is the tracked case and is the firm's principal named appearance in the current dataset; the 1882 opinion addresses a reissue dispute over a siphon-pump improvement. Bayard H. Christy's 1939 historical memoir, The Patent Bar of Pittsburgh, records that Bakewell or his partner appeared before the U.S. Supreme Court fourteen times between roughly 1845 and 1891 — Bakewell in nine, Christy in six, and once together — with seven of those appeals arising from the Western District of Pennsylvania. A widely reported Supreme Court patent appeal with Andrew Carnegie as a witness and a 5–4 reversal sustaining the patent appears in that memoir in a passage that most likely refers to Expanded Metal Co. v. Bradford, 214 U.S. 366 (1909); treat that identification as inferred, not confirmed, and note the memoir states both Bakewell and his partner had died before the appeal reached the Court, with Frederick P. Fish taking over the argument. No verdicts, damages awards, or settlement figures for this practice are verifiable from public sources.

PTAB / IPR practice and key personnel. There is no PTAB, IPR, or PGR practice to report, and none could exist: the Patent Trial and Appeal Board and inter partes review were created by the America Invents Act of 2012, more than a century after this practice ceased. Any claim of IPR volume for this firm would be false. The two named partners of record are William Bakewell (founder; the leading patent advocate in Pittsburgh in his era, and preceptor to a generation of the city's patent bar; also long-serving secretary-treasurer of the Monongahela Navigation Company) and Thomas B. Kerr (junior named partner; later associated with Kerr & Curtis in New York and Kerr, Page & Cooper, and appearing in Federal Reporter cases such as Westinghouse Electric & Mfg. Co. v. Cutter Electric & Mfg. Co.). A third figure, Thomas W. Bakewell (William's son), joined the practice in 1883 and appears as counsel in later appellate matters. Current-day contacts, attorney counts, and revenue figures for Bakewell & Kerr do not exist and should not be reported.