12255 El Camino Real Suite 250, San Diego, CA USA 92130
1302 El Camino Real Suite 175, Menlo Park, CA USA 94025
Mr. Shaffer (Bill) focuses his practice on patent prosecution and counseling, patent portfolio building/management, patent analysis and post-grant patent procedures, including reexamination and reissue proceedings. He has been a trusted advisor to a number of the largest companies in the electronics and software industries helping the companies grow their patent portfolios and navigate complex patent issues. Specific technologies Mr. Shaffer has experience with include, among others, consumer products, thin film processing, semiconductor manufacturing equipment, wafer inspection and metrology, chip-level packaging, computer generated imagery (CGI) animation, LiDAR, photovoltaic systems and films, computer architecture and software- and Internet-based technologies.
During the course of his 25+ year career as a patent attorney, Mr. Shaffer has assisted patent litigation efforts in jurisdictions including the Northern District of California, the Eastern District of Texas, the Eastern District of Virginia and the International Trade Commission. He has also been the lead or co-lead attorney for a dozen reexaminations, including both inter partes and ex parte matters, many of which involved patents in litigation, representing both patent owners and challengers. Mr. Shaffer has also advised prominent venture capital backed start-ups and provided in depth analysis of individual patents and patent portfolios in connection with venture capital investments and corporate acquisitions.
Prior to joining the legal profession, Mr. Shaffer worked both as a software engineer writing assembly language code for consumer electronics products as well as writing ADA code for a large government-based contract in the defense industry.
Mr. Shaffer was recognized as a Northern California "Super Lawyer" in the area of Intellectual Property by Super Lawyers magazine (2011-2018). He was recognized in The Best Lawyers in America® for Patent Law (2021-2023). Mr. Shaffer was recommended by Legal 500 US for Patent Prosecution (2012-2017, 2021). He was named an "IP Star" by Managing Intellectual Property magazine (2013-2022). Mr. Shaffer was recognized as a top patent practitioner by IAM Patent 1000 – The World’s Leading Patent Practitioners (2013-2022). He was named by Legal Media Group in its 2013 Guide to the World's Leading Patent Practitioners. Mr. Shaffer was listed as "Best of the Bar" in 2014 by the San Diego Business Journal.
Experience
Lead counsel successfully defended multiple reexaminations on a family of computer patents with concurrent litigation, enabling over $100 million in licensing revenue for our client.
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Southern Methodist University J.D. (1992) Thompson Scholar, The International Lawyer, Articles Editor
Vanderbilt University B.S. (1988) Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
California (1992)
U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (1993)
American Bar Association
American Intellectual Property Law Association
San Francisco Intellectual Property Law Association
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