Coblentz Patch Duffy & Bass

I'll research the firm's profile and the tracked case before drafting.

Now let me verify the tracked case and the named partner.

Let me verify Coblentz's role in the I/P Engine litigation and check the IP practice page.

Coblentz Patch Duffy & Bass LLP — Patent Litigation Practice Summary

Firm overview. Coblentz Patch Duffy & Bass LLP is a full-service, midsized San Francisco firm — roughly 104 lawyers across two offices (San Francisco's One Montgomery Street and Napa, California) — with roots dating to 1890 per Chambers' USA 2026 profile. It is not an AmLaw 200 firm; it ranks in the NLJ 500 (No. 375 in 2025) and describes itself as one of San Francisco's leading mid-sized firms. Core strengths are real estate, litigation, corporate, employment, tax, data privacy/cybersecurity, IP, and family wealth; IP is one of several practices rather than the firm's organizing principle.

IP litigation specialty. The firm's IP group is litigation-forward and concentrates on copyright, trade secret, trademark, and patent disputes, describing itself as having "represented many of the world's leading technology companies in their most important patent and trade secret matters." Technology exposure, per the firm's own attorney bios, spans wireless and cellular networks, semiconductors, communications and networking, cloud storage, memory, mobile device UI/management, data compression, online advertising systems, AI, medical devices, biotechnology, and consumer products; the firm also has an unusually strong music-industry copyright practice. This is a commercial-litigation-breadth firm with IP depth in Northern California tech and entertainment, not a technical patent boutique.

Side preference. The firm is effectively a defense-side shop in patent work, with a plaintiff-side dimension in copyright. The case list here shows a single tracked patent appearance, on the defendant side (lead counsel), with no tracked NPE/PAE plaintiff representations. Its copyright plaintiff work runs the other direction — the firm appears for music publisher plaintiffs against AI companies — and its attorneys' bios state they have represented both plaintiffs and defendants in patent and trade secret disputes. On the evidence available, characterize it as a defense-oriented IP litigator with selective plaintiff-side copyright engagements.

Notable matters and outcomes. The one tracked patent case, I/P Engine, Inc. v. Microsoft Corp. (S.D.N.Y. No. 1:13-cv-00688, filed January 2013), was a Vringo/I‑P Engine assertion of U.S. Patent Nos. 6,314,420 and 6,775,664 against Bing search advertising; it resolved by settlement in May 2013, with Microsoft paying $1 million, agreeing to pay 5% of amounts Google paid for the same patents, capping total liability, and assigning six patents to I/P Engine. That settlement is verifiable from Vringo's SEC filings and contemporaneous press coverage. Caveat: I could not independently confirm via court dockets or press that the firm or Richard R. Patch was counsel of record for Microsoft in that matter; the firm's appearance rests on the tracked case data provided, not on a source I verified. More visibly, Coblentz is counsel to the music publisher plaintiffs in Concord Music Group, Inc. v. Anthropic PBC (N.D. Cal. No. 3:24-cv-03811), the AI training-data copyright litigation, and reported as co-counsel on a follow-on ~$3 billion music-publisher suit against Anthropic in early 2026 — again copyright, not patent. Separately, partner Barbara Barath's bio credits her with helping secure a $764.6 million jury verdict plus $34.2 million in fees in a trade-secret/source-code case in 2020, but that was obtained before she joined Coblentz (at Kirkland & Ellis), so it should not be presented as a Coblentz result.

PTAB/IPR practice and key personnel. There is a PTAB component — special counsel Christopher McKinley, a former USPTO patent examiner, litigates in district court, the PTAB, the ITC, and abroad, and Bina Patel's practice spans patent appeals — but no public report supports a stated IPR/PGR filing volume, so treat PTAB scale as unquantified and likely modest relative to dedicated IP boutiques. Prominent IP names include Jeffrey G. Knowles (co-managing partner; trial lawyer with IP emphasis; co-lead counsel for the music-publisher plaintiffs in the Napster appeal, A&M Records v. Napster, 239 F.3d 1004 (9th Cir. 2001)); Barbara N. Barath (joined the partnership in July 2025 from Debevoise & Plimpton, with prior IP litigation roles at Kirkland & Ellis and Morrison & Foerster); Bina Patel (elected partner January 2025; IP and appellate litigation); and, on the trademark side, Sabrina A. Larson and Karen Frank. Name partner Richard R. Patch is a complex civil litigator with a cable/telecommunications trial and appellate practice and some patent dispute experience, and is listed here as lead counsel on the firm's single tracked patent matter — he is not primarily an IP specialist.