Michael W. De Vries

De Vries and a team of attorneys with Kirkland & Ellis LLP scored a win for client Cisco Systems Inc. in its long-running legal battle with Arista Networks Inc. over networking patents last June.

The U.S. International Trade Commission ruled an Arista petition to suspend a limited exclusion order barring importation of products was found to infringe Cisco’s patents. In the Matter of Certain Network Devices, Related Software and Components Thereof (ITC, filed Jan. 27, 2015).

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld the ITC ruling in September, but the case remains ongoing while the two sides continue to battle.

De Vries is considered a go-to intellectual property lawyer by Cisco, Intel Corp. and Motorola Solutions Inc. IP law has been his passion from early in law school, when as a new law student, he learned that his school — UC Berkeley School of Law — offered a certificate program with an emphasis on technology and IP.

He said he represents his clients by employing a two-pronged strategy.

First, in order to help juries surmount the learning curve for complex technologies, De Vries said he surrounds himself with people who are “very knowledgeable about the technology at a deep level,” which includes expert witnesses as well as his fellow Kirkland attorneys — many of whom hold advanced degrees and have worked as engineers for leading technology companies.

Second, De Vries works to make the information “digestible” to a jury by focusing on the key issues and by taking the time to teach them what they need to learn. Overall, De Vries said, “Our experience has been juries have been remarkably good when information is presented in a way that’s digestible — we found juries to come up with very good technical decisions.”

Though De Vries doesn’t have a technical background himself, his father was a pharmaceutical research scientist and his brother is a longtime software engineer who is currently at Alphabet Inc.-owned Google, and said that part of his interest in tech stems from his talks with them. “When I first got started, I spent a lot of time getting free advice from them,” he said.

What makes De Vries love his job is the fact that “every case presents an opportunity to learn something entirely new.”

“I believe in the ability of technology to transform the world in a good way and bring benefits to all people,” he said. “And it’s important to protect the research that brings people those technologies.”

— L.J. Williamson