Aseet Patel Image

Aseet Patel

Patent Counsel

Aseet Patel is a patent counsel and an intellectual property strategist. He specializes in building and managing strategic patent portfolios and guiding clients’ in-house patent programs. Aseet has experience with utility and design patent prosecution, IP counseling, and patent litigation matters for a wide range of industries.

Aseet frequently writes, teaches, and speaks about the protection and enforcement of inventions involving the Internet of Things (IoT), industrial Internet of Things, augmented reality (AR/VR), artificial intelligence (AI), and digital health/medical devices.  Aseet often collaborates with engineering and product management executives to help them identify innovations and to develop an appropriate protection strategy, considering their long-term business goals.  He is relied upon by the c-suite to provide insights into risk management, acquisition strategies, and IP related issues that arise in the course of business operations.

Aseet relies on his experience as a former Patent Examiner at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office when representing clients in all phases of the prosecution of patent applications. While at the USPTO, he specialized in high technology inventions such as memory devices, RAMs/ROMs, flash memories, caching algorithms, and memory partitioning techniques.  Before serving at the USPTO, Aseet worked as a programmer for Trilogy Software, Inc. in Austin, Texas, where he helped develop and deploy multi-million-dollar software products for Fortune 500 clients. He was Java Programmer Certified by Sun Microsystems and has developed e-commerce software using Java, Javascript, relational database technologies, and other web technologies.

Aseet is Vice President of and serves on the board of the Chicago Intellectual Property Alliance (CIPA). He developed CIPA’s partnership with Girls4Science, enabling CIPA members to volunteer to teach young women about patent, copyrights and other legal topics as they relate to the current science topic of their semester. He was recognized in Lawyers of Color‘s “Hot List 2013,” an inaugural publication that honors early- to mid-career attorneys from six different regions in the U.S. who have excelled in the legal profession. Additionally, Aseet was featured as a “Leading Lawyer” in the 2022 edition of Law Bulletin Media for intellectual property law.

Recent Articles by Aseet Patel

Examining the USPTO’s Patents 4 Partnerships Platform

Intellectual property (IP) is a “bridge to collaboration” between companies, and not just a “weapon of competitive warfare.” The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) launched an IP licensing marketplace, “Patents 4 Partnerships” (P4P), on May 4 that is a platform furthering this ideology. The P4P platform is initially being limited to technologies related to COVID-19 to address the ongoing pandemic. However, USPTO Director Andrei Iancu seems prepared to expand the platform to include other technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI) innovations and cancer treatments, based on interest and engagement during this pilot phase.

First PTAB Reversals Under New Subject Matter Eligibility Guidance

Since having been sworn in as the new director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) in February 2018, Andrei Iancu has led the charge to improve predictability of patent-eligible subject matter. In his speech at the Intellectual Property Owners’ (IPO) Association’s annual meeting in Chicago in late September 2018, the director told IPO’s membership that the USPTO is “contemplating revised guidance to help categorize the exceptions [to patent eligibility]—and indeed to name them—and instruct examiners on how to apply them.” Moreover, Director Iancu had created a new post that coordinates between the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) of the USPTO and the examining corps, and he installed former PTAB Chief Judge David Ruschke to that post in August 2018. True to his word, on January 7, 2019, Director Iancu issued “2019 Revised Patent Subject Matter Eligibility Guidance,” which explains how U.S. Patent Examiners should analyze patent-eligibility questions under the judicial exception to 35 U.S.C. § 101. See 84 Fed. Reg. 50-57 (Revised Guidance). In less than two weeks since the Revised Guidance, the PTAB issued two decisions reversing examiners’ 35 USC § 101 rejections based on the Revised Guidance—ex parte Rockwell, Appeal No. 2018-004973, Jan. 16, 2019; and ex parte Fanaru, Appeal No. 2017-002898, Jan. 22, 2019.