K&L Gates

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K&L Gates LLP — Patent Litigation Practice Summary

Firm overview. K&L Gates LLP is a full-service global law firm headquartered at K&L Gates Center, 210 Sixth Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA. Chambers describes it as having approximately 2,000 lawyers and policy professionals across more than 40 offices on five continents (roughly 24 U.S. offices and 21 international, including London, Brussels, Frankfurt, Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo, Seoul, Sydney and Melbourne). Independent headcount ranking (ILRG's 2025 America's 350 Largest Law Firms) places it at No. 17 in the U.S. with 1,732 attorneys and 854 partners; the firm states its revenue has exceeded $1 billion in each of the last six reported years. This is a BigLaw Am Law 100–scale general practice platform, not an IP boutique — intellectual property is one of nine firmwide practice areas alongside corporate, finance, litigation and regulatory groups.

IP litigation specialty. The group is a full-service IP practice — litigation, procurement and portfolio management, post-grant proceedings, and technology transactions — rather than a single-technology shop. The tracked docket and firm bios show concentration in: wireless and mobile communications/standards work, including Wi-Fi, 4G/5G, RAN and antenna technologies and IEEE/ETSI/3GPP standard-essential patent issues (Massively Broadband v. Samsung; Honeywell/Telit/Sierra Wireless v. 3G Licensing); semiconductors and electronics; software and enterprise/network systems; medical devices and imaging; pharmaceuticals including Hatch-Waxman/ANDA work (partners Jenna Bruce and Elizabeth Weiskopf); industrial, mechanical and agricultural chemicals; trade secrets (Chambers cites a Novozymes trade secret trial in the Central District of Illinois); and ITC Section 337 investigations (Alan L. Barry, Jas Dhillon). Chambers USA 2026 ranks the IP practice Band 2 in the District of Columbia and Pennsylvania, Band 3 in North Carolina, Band 4 in Massachusetts and Band 5 in Illinois; Legal 500 U.S. recognizes the group for patent prosecution, re-examination and post-grant proceedings, naming Jason Engel and Matthew Dicke as department co-heads.

Side preference. The tracked record is essentially symmetrical — 18 plaintiff-side and 19 defendant-side appearances — and the substance supports genuinely two-sided work rather than a single posture. Plaintiff-side matters include representing patent owners and NPEs (Massively Broadband LLC in E.D. Tex., Barco, LS Cable & System, AQ Corporation) as well as acting as IPR petitioner for Unified Patents, a defensive aggregator (Unified Patents v. Olaplex). Defense-side matters include Google (CardWare Inc. v. Google, local counsel), Microsoft (Walker Digital) and LiveAdmins (Disintermediation Services). One nuance worth flagging: a meaningful share of the "defendant"-tagged entries are patent-owner defenses in PTAB proceedings (Unified Patents v. Massively Broadband; Unified Patents v. LS Cable) rather than district-court defendants. Net effect: the firm is not a pure operating-company defense shop, and its most concentrated recent activity — the Pittsburgh-based team of McElhinny, Knedeisen, Ellenberger, Shabalov and Verdini — has been assertive patent-owner-side litigation in the Eastern District of Texas paired with parallel IPR defense.

Notable matters. The firm's most prominent published patent result is Carnegie Mellon University v. Marvell Technology Group, where K&L partner Patrick J. McElhinny co-led the team that obtained a $1.5 billion judgment (reported as the largest U.S. verdict of 2012 and one of the largest patent judgments ever), per the firm's own attorney bio. In the largest tracked matter, Massively Broadband LLC v. Samsung Electronics (E.D. Tex. No. 2:25-cv-00608, Judge Gilstrap), K&L represents the plaintiff asserting twelve Wi-Fi/5G relay, smart-antenna and network-monitoring patents against Samsung Galaxy and RAN products; the docket shows a joint motion to stay all deadlines and notice of settlement filed in September 2026, with no publicly confirmed terms. In Honeywell International, Telit Cinterion, Thales DIS and Sierra Wireless v. 3G Licensing, K&L's Erik Halverson argued the appeal for all appellants and the Federal Circuit reversed the PTAB in January 2025 (World IP Review). The firm also obtained voluntary dismissal of a patent suit brought by NPE Pointwise Ventures against client Syte Visual Conception (W.D. Tex. 2024), and represents AeroVironment in Arlton v. AeroVironment on a Section 1498 government-contractor immunity defense. Most other tracked matters are ongoing or resolved without a published outcome.

PTAB/IPR practice and key partners. K&L Gates maintains a dedicated post-grant practice group and is a regular PTAB participant on both sides — as IPR petitioner (Unified Patents matters) and as patent-owner defense counsel (the Unified Patents IPRs against Massively Broadband and LS Cable, plus roughly a dozen Samsung IPRs filed against its client's patents in the Massively Broadband dispute). Chicago partner Erik J. Halverson is the most visible PTAB practitioner and a frequent author on Board procedure. On scale, a caveat is warranted: K&L Gates does not appear among the most-active PTAB filers in Lex Machina's 2025 Patent Litigation Report (top ranks led by Fish & Richardson, Finnegan, Baker Botts, Russ August & Kabat and McKool Smith for 2022–2024), and no public report supports a specific petition-volume figure for the firm — it should be characterized as an active but not top-of-market PTAB filer. Practice leaders most reliably sourced from the firm site and rankings: Jason A. Engel (Chicago; IP department co-head, post-grant and patent litigation), Matthew Dicke (IP department co-head), Devon Beane (named firmwide co-chair of the IP litigation practice group, per Crain's Chicago Business 2024), Patrick J. McElhinny (Pittsburgh; Chambers-ranked annually since 2006), John J. Cotter (Boston; Chambers-ranked, the firm's first firmwide IP litigation practice group coordinator) and Pam Kohli Jacobson (Seattle; IP practice group coordinator, Chambers Band 2, Washington).