Legal specialists in intellectual property reflect sector's rise

More northern Nevada attorneys are specializing in intellectual property law as the region's economy continues to attract technology and renewable energy companies.

As competition grows, law firms and sometimes individual attorneys seek to carve out positions for themselves as specialists within an intellectual property niche such as trademarks or patent law.

The trend reflects the growing importance of intellectual property to individual companies, says Rick Campbell, a partner in the Reno office of the law firm Armstrong Teasdale.

"An idea can be worth multiple millions, if not billions, of dollars," he says. "This is an important part of our practice. We have large clients who have large patent portfolios."

As recently as five years ago, only about a third of the approximately 100 participants in the Intellectual Property Section of the State Bar of Nevada were handling intellectual property work fulltime, says Bryce Earl, a shareholder with the law firm of Santoro, Driggs, Walch, Kearney, Holley & Thompson in Las Vegas and one of the leaders of the intellectual property section.

Today, he says specialists account for at least half of the attorneys who handle intellectual property work, and the number is growing.

"There are a lot more doing it," Earl says.

Bob Ryan, an intellectual property attorney with Holland & Hart in Reno, arrived in town in 1996 as the legal counsel for StarGuide Digital Networks and found he needed to make a lot of long-distance calls to intellectual property specialists.

"There was very little advanced IP practice in Reno," he says. "The demand was here, but the work was all going out of state."

The situation began to turn, Ryan says, after the Phoenix firm of Lewis & Roca successfully overturned a State Bar of Nevada rule that essentially closed Nevada's borders to regional and national law firms.

The State Supreme Court issued rules in 2002 that allowed out-of-state firms to open shop under their own names in Nevada, and that allowed intellectual property practices in Nevada to bring in out-of-state lawyers to help with sophisticated cases.

The Supreme Court's action arrived at about the same time as growth in the volume and complexity of intellectual property questions in northern Nevada, says Paul Deyhle, a partner with McDonald Carano Wilson in Reno who devotes a portion of his practice to intellectual property questions.

The law has grown more complex, he says, with the rise of the knowledge-based economy and the growth of sophisticated technology companies in the region.

"There are a lot of companies coming with an intellectual property portfolio who are looking for local counsel," Deyhle says.

But many Nevada companies continue to use out-of-state counsel for patents, trademarks, copyright and other work, says Michael Rounds, a partner in the Reno-based boutique law firm Watson-Rounds, which counts intellectual property as one of a small group of areas in which it practices.

"About 90 percent of the time, we are litigating against attorneys who are from out of state," says Rounds.

Another indication: Out-of-state firms, he says, continue to market their intellectual-property services within Nevada, viewing the state as potentially underserved by its own firms.

The state's efforts to become a center for renewable energy are likely to further fuel practices of intellectual property law, says Armstrong Teasdale's Campbell.

"A lot of that industry is patent-able," he says.

Patent law is an area in which Armstrong Teasdale is attempting to position itself as a specialist. Out of 55 attorneys in the intellectual property group of the St. Louis-based firm, 39 are registered to practice before the U.S. Patent and Trademark office. That number includes three attorneys with the firm in Nevada.

Watson Rounds, meanwhile, has built a reputation as a litigator of intellectual property cases ranging from a patent infringement lawsuit involving a dollar-bill validator inside a slot machined to a trademark case brought by the Reno Air Races against a T-shirt marketer.