Am Law 100 firm Blank Rome has strengthened its IP litigation group with the hire of Andrew Kopsidas as a partner in its Washington DC office. 

Kopsidas has joined from from Hughes Hubbard & Reed, where he practised for just under two years as partner after spending more than 20 years at Fish & Richardson. He brings particular expertise in patent and trade secret litigation, and as lead trial counsel has represented clients before the US International Trade Commission (ITC), the US Patent & Trademark Office and the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, as well as district courts in dozens of states.

Blank Rome has been responding to the increase in activity in the IP litigation space by boosting its IP recruitment, adding 12 partners, associates and patent agents over the past 18 months. Among them was partner Walter Davis Jr, who joined its IP litigation group in Washington DC last April from Davidson Berquist Jackson & Gowdy.

Blank Rome’s chair and managing partner, Grant Palmer, said Kopsidas’s experience handling a wide variety of IP matters in courts across the country for domestic and international companies “will further enhance the service we provide to our clients in this space”.

Kopsidas has handled patents, trade secret and other IP matters for clients ranging from start-ups to the biggest companies in the fields of autonomous vehicles, internet applications, semiconductors, telecommunications networks and standards, mobile technology, digital signal processing and various software, mechanical and chemical inventions.

Partner and co-chair of the intellectual property litigation group, Paul Zeineddin, said that Kopsidas spends a sizeable portion of his practice litigating matters in federal district courts, including the Eastern District of Texas, and on ITC work. He has been involved in “dozens of high-stakes investigations, many through trial”, he added. 

Commenting on his new post, Kopsidas said that he was impressed by the firm’s IP litigation practice and “collaborative atmosphere across practices and industry teams”.

Before going to law school, he worked at NASA as a flight controller and systems engineer on the Hubble Space Telescope and several Space Shuttle missions. He also worked as an aerospace design engineer at the US Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC.