Tom Millikan focuses his practice on patent litigation and trials. Tom has represented technology leaders, established and emerging companies, and small inventors in district courts nationwide and in the U.S. International Trade Commission. He also provides strategic intellectual property counseling, including tactical patent prosecution, and advice on patent infringement, validity, reexaminations and due diligence.
Experienced in numerous technologies, Tom has worked on cases involving video compression, audio compression, speech compression, bio-chemical decontamination, unified communications, video conferencing, gaming systems, image enhancement and distributed databases. His achievements include forcing favorable settlements for both plaintiffs and defendants, and originating winning liability defenses for a software company in a series of trials named among the “Top 10 Litigation Wins” by IP Law and Business.
In 2013, Tom’s peers recognized him as a San Diego County Top Attorney in Intellectual Property Litigation, as named by The Daily Transcript. Prior to law school, Tom worked at Texas Instruments as a digital signal processing engineer, where he designed software and systems for MP3 players, mobile phones, GPS systems and video players. He managed and mentored teams of engineers in Asia, Europe and North America while servicing customers in Hong Kong, Korea, Japan, Austria and England. Tom was also recognized as the 1998 Intern of the Year for Texas Instruments. His engineering career also led to several inventions, including:
- U.S. Patent No. 6,847,593, “Method for Constructing Compress Audio File System in a Compact Disc Player”
- U.S. Patent No. 6,928,039, “Method and Apparatus for the Reduction of Power Consumption in a Compact Disc Player”
- U.S. Patent No. 7,023,770, “Encoding Rate-Based, Programmable, Linear Velocity, Compressed Audio Compact Disc Player”
- U.S. Patent No. 7,042,813, “Shock Protection for Compressed Audio on a CD Player”
- U.S. Patent No. 7,343,019, “Streaming Normalization”
- U.S. Patent No. 7,702,721, “Method and apparatus for providing music information for a wireless audio player”
Tom's experience as an electrical engineer allows him to dive deeper into the merits of intellectual property issues and adds to his understanding of clients' perspectives and challenges.
Professional Recognition
- Recognized as a leader in Patexia’s Patent Litigation Intelligence Report, 2021
- Listed in Best Lawyers in America: Litigation - Patent, 2021 – 2022
- "Top 100 best performing attorneys representing Petitioners" in the IPR Intelligence Report in 2019 by Patexia. Insights
- Recommended in Intellectual Asset Management Patent 1000, 2019 – 2023
- Named a “Top Attorney” (Intellectual Property Litigation) in San Diego by the San Diego Daily Transcript, 2013
Professional Leadership
- Yeakel IP Inn of Court, Austin, TX, Barrister Member, 2023
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Judge Alan Albright Working Group, 2023
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University of Texas School of Law, Patent Advocacy Course, 2022 – 2023
- Cleantech San Diego, Board Member, 2019 – present
- University of Cincinnati, College of Engineering, Industry Advisory Board, 2018 – present
Related Employment
- Fish & Richardson P.C., Partner
- Texas Instruments, Digital Media Engineer