Fish & Richardson Announces Juanita Brooks and Ruffin Cordell Named to “Intellectual Property Trailblazers” List by NLJ

Fish & Richardson has announced that San Diego-based IP litigator Juanita Brooks been named an “Intellectual Property (IP) Trailblazers” by The National Law Journal (NLJ). Also named was Ruffin Cordell of Fish’s Washington, D.C. office. Both were included for “deep passion and perseverance in pursuit of their mission” and for “having achieved remarkable successes.” This year’s IP Trailblazers annual list was culled from hundreds of nominations of leaders in patent, copyright, trademark, and trade secret law.

Brooks, who is a principal in Fish’s Southern California office based in northern San Diego County, has a nationally recognized trial practice specializing in complex IP litigation. She has handled more than 150 trials in her career and has served as lead counsel in more than a dozen patent trials in the last few years. A master storyteller with an innate ability to decipher sophisticated technologies with words, Brooks has been extraordinarily innovative in her use of graphics in the courtroom – allowing her to explain complex technology to lay jurors and judges. Brooks’ stellar record and reputation as an IP superstar has made her one of the most sought after patent litigators in the nation. Fortune 500 companies and start-ups alike turn to Brooks when the financial stakes are high. Her patent litigation success has protected billions of dollars of sales for her clients and made new patent law.

Cordell, who is a principal in Fish’s Washington, D.C. office, is a powerhouse patent litigator with deep experience at the district and appellate courts, at the PTAB, and at the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) where he is considered a true visionary at handling Section 337 patent proceedings. In the early 1990s, after procedural changes made patent cases easier to bring in the ITC, Cordell saw the opportunity to provide his high profile clients with faster and more definitive protection for their products. He is now considered one of, if not the, top IP attorney in the country trying cases before the ITC, and has handled well over 50 ITC cases. Many of Cordell’s cases involve multi-jurisdictional disputes at both the ITC and in the federal district courts. Cordell is the attorney that many of the largest companies in the world trust with their highest stakes patent litigation.

Three other Fish principals – Michael McKeon, a well-known patent litigator, and Dorothy Whelan and Karl Renner, who co-chair Fish’s Post-Grant Group – have been recognized as IP Trailblazers since the NLJ started the list in 2014.