c. alex shank

Combining technical aptitude with legal advocacy to maximize value for clients facing their most challenging patent obstacles

Alex Shank focuses his practice on complex due-diligence investigations, freedom-to-operate analyses, pre-litigation strategy, and prosecution. He leverages his background as a patent litigator and Federal Circuit clerk to identify opportunities and issues in securing and challenging patents, and to manage patent portfolios and IP life cycles more broadly. To date, Alex’s life-sciences patent experience spans treatments for pain, diabetes, high cholesterol, Parkinson’s Disease, multiple sclerosis, ocular hypertension, mesothelioma, and HIV, as well as heart-implant devices, medical-imaging techniques, drug-delivery vehicles, and antibody drugs, among other technologies. For Alex’s strategic, sophisticated, and efficient patent advocacy, Super Lawyers named him a Rising Star, and Best Lawyers named him One to Watch.

Alex previously honed his legal and technical advocacy as a patent litigator at Kirkland & Ellis LLP and as a clerk for the Honorable Richard Taranto at the Federal Circuit. He has represented patent owners and challengers before the Federal Circuit, district courts, the International Trade Commission, and the Patent Trial and Appeal Board. His extensive appellate experience includes authoring more than 40 briefs in Federal Circuit and Supreme Court matters, including appeals from Hatch-Waxman and BPCIA trials. Alex has argued at Markman and discovery hearings, deposed and defended corporate and expert witnesses, and drafted motions to dismiss, transfer, stay, and compel; motions for a preliminary injunction and summary judgment; Markman and post-trial briefs; and inter partes and post-grant review petitions, responses, expert reports, and other pleadings.

Select Publications

“Butyrophenone on O-TiO2(110): One Dimensional Motion in a Weakly-Confined Potential Well,” ACS Nano 6(4): 2925-2930 (2012) (coauthor). 

 “Ab Initio and Hybrid Potential Energy Surfaces, Intramolecular Vibrational Energies, and Classical IR Spectrum of the Water Dimer,” Journal of Chemical Physics 130:144414, (2009) (coauthor).