Denise De Mory

Before she co-founded Bunsow De Mory LLP in 2012, Denise M. De Mory had built up wide experience as a trial attorney at Keker, Van Nest & Peters LLP, at Howrey LLP, at the U.S. Department of Justice and elsewhere.

She was a member of the government’s trial team in the high-profile U.S. v. Microsoft antitrust litigation in the 1990s. She’d gained scientific expertise studying mathematics and computer science as an undergraduate.

Now, as managing partner of her own majority women-owned shop specializing in plaintiff-side litigation, she focuses on patent, trade secrets and other IP cases.

“It’s an exciting time,” she said of recent talent acquisitions designed to reinforce her firm’s patent litigation practice. In April, she announced that trial lawyers Elizabeth Day, Marc C. Belloli and Jerry D. Tice II had joined from the IP litigation boutique Day co-founded, Kramer Day Alberti Lim Tonkovich & Belloli

In a media statement, De Mory said: “Patent enforcement work is some of the toughest legal work out there; we regularly face firms

100 times our size and some of the biggest technology companies in the world. And we succeed. Adding the powerhouse team of Elizabeth, Marc and Jerry is the latest in a series of recent exceptional hires at Bunsow De Mory, and we expect that growth trend to continue.”

De Mory is currently representing Agilent Technologies Inc. in a competitor suit to enforce Agilent’s patents relating to chemical modifications to guide RNA in CRISPR genome editing technologies. The modifications have been widely adopted by the biotech industry because of their advantages over non-modified guide RNA. Agilent Technologies Inc. v. Synthego Corp., 1:21-cv-01426 (D. Del., filed Oct.6, 2021); Synthego Corp. v. Agilent Technologies Inc., 3:21-cv-07801 (N.D. Cal., filed Oct. 5, 2021).

Although ownership of CRISPR patents has been litigated, this is the first case asserting infringement of a CRISPR patent, De Mory said, adding, “There’s a lot of controversy in the biospace over how broadly you can claim things.”

She represents Daedalus Blue LLC in asserting a series of early cloud computing patents it acquired from IBM against Microsoft Azure and SQL products. The case was being fought in district court and at the U.S. Patent Trial and Appeal Board and in ex-parte re-examination proceedings. Trial was set for June 2023, but they announced a settlement in October 2022. Daedalus Blue LLC v. Microsoft Corp., 6:20-cv-01152 (W.D. Tex., filed Dec. 16, 2020).

“A great outcome for our client,” De Mory said.

—John Roemer