Bryan Cave

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Bryan Cave (now Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner LLP) — Patent Litigation Practice

Firm overview. The firm tracked in this dataset as "Bryan Cave" is legacy Bryan Cave LLP, a St. Louis–headquartered general practice firm that combined with London's Berwin Leighton Paisner on April 3, 2018 to form Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner LLP (BCLP). The merged firm is a full-service, multinational platform — not an IP boutique. Chambers' USA 2026 profile describes BCLP as a "1200+ lawyer AmLaw100 law firm with offices in 31 locations across North America, Europe and the Middle East." Public rankings data place it comfortably in BigLaw territory: 1,097 U.S. attorneys (NLJ 500, 2025, 37th largest in the U.S.), $859.6 million gross revenue and No. 65 on the 2025 Am Law 200, and No. 74 on the 2024 Global 200. Note that the three tracked matters predate or straddle the 2018 merger and were filed under the "Bryan Cave LLP" name, with attorneys practicing out of the Atlanta office.

IP litigation specialty. BCLP's IP group is a mixed prosecution/litigation/licensing practice with a genuine PTAB and ITC Section 337 component. Its IAM Patent 1000 2026 profile credits the group with coverage of "prosecution, litigation and licensing," and the firm's own stated technical strengths include electronics, medical devices, nanotechnology, military hardware, software and wireless communications. That aligns with the tracked case list, which centers on wireless mesh networking and industrial remote-monitoring technology (the WirelessHART protocol and Emerson's Smart Wireless field devices), litigated against SIPCO LLC's patent portfolio. On the litigation side the firm's broader docket also includes significant pharmaceutical and mass-tort work (Janssen, Boehringer Ingelheim, Monsanto/Bayer), though those are products-liability rather than patent matters.

Side preference: operating companies. The tracked counts — 1 plaintiff-side, 2 defendant-side — should be read with care, because all three matters are facets of a single long-running dispute between Emerson Electric and SIPCO, a patent-monetization/NPE plaintiff. Bryan Cave was on Emerson's side throughout: as plaintiff-side counsel in Emerson's 2013 declaratory judgment action (N.D. Ga. No. 1:13-cv-02528) and as defense counsel in SIPCO's mirror infringement suits (E.D. Tex. No. 6:15-cv-00907; N.D. Ga. No. 1:16-cv-02690). In other words, the firm's patent litigation posture here is defending and clearing operating-company product lines against NPE assertions, not prosecuting claims for PAEs. The role designations also show the firm functioning largely in a local/Georgia counsel capacity (3 local counsel, 2 outside counsel, 1 lead trial counsel), with Virginia patent trial counsel (Davidson Berquist Jackson & Gowdey) and, on appeal, Ropes & Gray carrying the substantive lead.

Notable matters and outcomes. The Emerson–SIPCO dispute generated a meaningful body of Federal Circuit and PTAB precedent. In SIPCO, LLC v. Emerson Electric Co., 939 F.3d 1301 (Fed. Cir. 2019), the court reversed the PTAB's construction of "low-power transceiver," affirmed that the patent qualified as a covered business method patent, and vacated the Board's § 101/§ 103 rulings. Following Thryv, Inc. v. Click-to-Call, the Federal Circuit in Emerson Electric Co. v. SIPCO, LLC, No. 2018-1635 (Nov. 17, 2020), held that the threshold CBM-institution determination is non-appealable under 35 U.S.C. § 324(e) — an issue of first impression the Supreme Court remanded after granting certiorari. A separate appeal (No. 2018-1986) was affirmed by Rule 36 judgment (June 10, 2019). In the parallel ITC Section 337 investigation, the ALJ found no infringement of the '893 patent's "scalable address" limitation. Caveat on attribution: contemporaneous reporting attributes Emerson's unbroken win record in this dispute to Ropes & Gray's James L. Davis, Jr., who argued the appeals; Bryan Cave's docketed role was as Emerson's Georgia trial counsel, and the tracked records do not establish that the firm argued these Federal Circuit matters.

PTAB/IPR practice and key partners. The firm has a real but modest public PTAB footprint, and no reliable public figure for its annual IPR/PGR filing volume — treat any volume estimate as unsourced. Its capacity was materially upgraded in 2023, when BCLP hired a six-partner team from Dentons: Song K. Jung, who joined as Global Chair of Patents and whose practice spans prosecution, licensing and high-stakes IP disputes; Scott W. Cummings (Washington, D.C.), a former USPTO patent examiner and former Dentons IP head whom IAM Patent 1000 describes as "a PTAB expert [with] an excellent track record in inter partes reviews," with first-chair experience for both patent owners and challengers; Mark R. Kresloff, cited by IAM for electronics portfolio expertise; and the firm's own Damon J. Whitaker (counsel, Atlanta/Miami), who litigates patent cases in software, wireless communications and bio-chemical assays and holds a Best Lawyers recognition in IP litigation. William V. Custer IV (Atlanta) is the partner on the tracked Emerson matters but does not appear in the firm's public IP leadership rankings. Note that Jung's headline result (the LG Chem v. SKI lithium-ion battery trade-secret case, reported to have settled for $1.8 billion) was achieved at his prior firm, per BCLP's own announcement, and should not be attributed to BCLP.

Sourcing note: firm size, revenue and ranking figures are drawn from Chambers USA 2026, the NLJ 500, the Am Law 200 (via published firm-profile aggregators), and BCLP press releases. The PTAB volume figure is not publicly broken out and is deliberately omitted.