© 2015 The Texas Lawbook.
By Brooks Igo
(April 29) – McKool Smith made a splash this month when it announced it lured William “Bill” LaFuze to join its ranks.
LaFuze, who had been at Vinson & Elkins for more than 40 years, will practice out of McKool Smith’s Houston and Washington, D.C. offices. He says the new move has him feeling reenergized.
“I overlapped with Mike McKool in law school and followed his career,” said LaFuze, who had been the leader or co-leader of V&E’s IP practice group for many years. “After many years, it was amazing to see them grow into what I believe is the premiere IP law firm in the country.”
LaFuze has represented high profile clients across a number of industries. He has represented smartphone manufacturers in patent skirmishes, helped Coca-Cola’s bottlers get into the business of self-manufacturing their bottles and successfully defended Chesapeake Energy Company in a patent infringement dispute involving a horizontal drilling technique.
A past president of the American Intellectual Property Law Association and chair of the Section on Intellectual Property Law of the American Bar Association, LaFuze says patent reform is “fascinating to deal with.”
After President George W. Bush was elected for his first term, LaFuze was one of only two IP lawyers in the country selected to advise the Bush/Cheney administration through its Presidential Transition Team to counsel the then-new administration on patent policy, the operation of the USPTO and patent reform issues. By appointment of the U. S. Secretary of Commerce, he later served on the Patent Public Advisory Committee of the USPTO.
LaFuze says inter partes review (IPR), an alternative introduced by the America Invents Act to often more expensive and lengthier district court proceedings, have been effective in challenging the validity of patent claims.
Over nearly three years, for cases in which petitions for IPR were granted, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) has found at least some of the claims in issue invalid in approximately 80 percent of the cases, and all of the claims in issue invalid in about 70 percent of the cases, LaFuze says.
“The review process is designed to have a quality review by a panel of quality judges,” he said. “A lot of these patents shouldn’t have been issued in the first place.”
Due to recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions that have limited the scope of patentable subject matter, LaFuze believes that the overall size of the pie for patent litigation work is likely to shrink, which means lawyers will have to work harder to distinguish themselves.
“Firms like McKool will fare well in this market,” he said.
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