Sarah Guske

Sarah J. Guske, the chair of the California intellectual property group at Baker Botts L.L.P., is one of the few female lawyers to hold summa cum laude degrees in both physics and electrical engineering.

"It was 25 years ago, but it's a help to be conversant with the roots of the science, to know what goes on from an inventor's and patent holder's side, how much work goes into it," she said. "And from a defense side, understanding how the devil is often in the structural details of these patents."

She has leveraged her depth of knowledge to represent clients in litigation involving telecommunication protocols and systems, location services, optical components and systems, cloud services, MPEG multimedia data for broadcast and graphic chipset design.

And Guske shares her knowledge. She has served as an adjunct professor of PTAB trials and patent law at the University of Denver's Sturm College of Law, at the University of Colorado School of Law and at UC College of the Law, San Francisco.

Guske went beyond her typical litigation work last year in representing the digital banker Chime Financial Inc. as it joined with Facebook and Instagram's parent to sue two Nigerian-based fraudsters who ran phishing attacks to access and attempt to withdraw funds from online financial accounts.

Leading the team, she obtained a default judgment and a permanent injunction that barred the defendants from accessing the social networks' platforms and from using Chime's trademarks. Meta Platforms Inc. and Chime Financial Inc. v. Arowokoko et al., 3:22-cv-00803 (N.D. Cal., filed Feb. 8, 2022).

"It was a bit of a step outside my patent litigation pipeline, but the client knew we could assemble the right strategy to leverage the IP to protect their customers," Guske said. She filed claims for counterfeiting, trademark infringement, unfair competition and breach of contract, then obtained the court's permission to serve the complaint and summons via email. "These foreign actors did not desire to come into the U.S. to defend themselves," she said.

In defense of client Tile Inc., a maker of tracking devices, Guske achieved a PTAB final written decision holding all of a plaintiff's asserted patent claims are unpatentable--despite the plaintiff's attempt to terminate the IPR in view of an unfavorable district court decision. Linquet Technologies Inc. v. Tile Inc., 3:20-cv-05153 (N.D Cal., filed July 27, 2020).

Another case for Tile, which has been acquired by Life360 for $205 million, is in progress. "It's really rewarding to help companies like this in their growth phase. This is a great innovator in the tracking space," Guske said.

-- John Roemer