Alex Stein leads the firm’s patent practice in Seattle, using his real-world software engineering background to assist clients with their patent procurement, enforcement, and defense needs. He has helped clients, both large and small, obtain hundreds of domestic and international patents, securing protection for technologies in diverse areas of computer science, electrical engineering, and human-computer interactions. Alex co-leads the firm’s US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) litigation practice—with a focus on developing winning PTAB strategies—overseeing more than 80 America Invents Act (AIA) trial proceedings, as well as numerous reexamination proceedings.
For petitioners and patent owners alike, Alex has helped deliver successful results in post-grant proceedings. Alex leverages these successes to deliver business-focused counsel to his active patent-prosecution practice. He has helped draft—and successfully prosecute to allowance—hundreds of patent applications in diverse technical areas, including artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, extended-reality devices and interaction paradigms, wireless-power delivery systems, biopotential-signal processing and control systems, graphics processing, and many others.
While in law school, Alex worked in the intellectual property department for a global provider of data storage, virtualization, and cloud computing services, where he prepared and prosecuted patent applications, evaluated products for compliance with open-source licenses, and helped defend against patent-infringement allegations. Before practicing law, he worked as a senior software engineer in the medical device industry designing, implementing, and automatically testing complex end-to-end systems for remotely monitoring patients with implanted pacemaker or defibrillator devices. Alex leverages these industry experiences to understand complex technologies quickly, explain those technologies in understandable terms to a variety of stakeholders, and to provide reasoned counsel that aligns with business objectives.
During law school, Alex served as the executive articles editor of the Michigan Telecommunications and Technology Law Review. For his third year of law school, he attended Stanford Law School as a visiting J.D. student, earning the Gerald Gunther Prize for extraordinary performance in Intellectual Property: International.
Recommended, Intellectual property: Patents: prosecution (including reexamination and post-grant proceedings), The Legal 500 US (2023)
Member, Practice Group of the Year, Intellectual Property, Law360 (2019)
Member, Litigation Department of the Year–Intellectual Property, The American Lawyer (2019)
Recipient, Gerald Gunther Prize for Outstanding Performance in Intellectual Property: International, Stanford Law School
Executive Articles Editor, Michigan Telecommunications and Technology Law Review
Recipient, Dean’s Scholarship (merit-based scholarship), University of Michigan Law School