Approach

No position gets taken in a case until the record is read all the way through. That means the patent, the numbered claims at the end of it, and the whole public file of what was said to the patent office to get it granted.

This sounds obvious and it frequently does not happen. The file is long, it is dull, and there is pressure to have a theory by the second week. A theory built before the record is read has to be defended later against the record itself, which is an expensive way to learn what was in it.

The training underneath it is two engineering degrees and a career that began writing patent applications rather than litigating them. Reading the file is not a chore delegated downward when the person reading it wrote hundreds of the same documents.

He developed a deep command of the patent history, understood the prosecution record better than the opposition, and identified weaknesses that materially changed the leverage in the case.

A judge, a jury, a board, a general counsel, a board of directors. None of them designed your product, and none of them will pretend to understand something twice. Whatever cannot be made plain to them does not exist in the case, however true it is in your building.

So the work of turning a technology into something a stranger can hold is not a presentation task that happens at the end. It shapes which arguments are worth making at all. An argument that is correct and unexplainable loses to one that is correct and clear.

The same is true inside your own company. The person who has to approve the budget is usually not the person who understands the technology, and they deserve an answer they can repeat accurately to someone else.

He has substantial expertise and experience, but also has the ability to reduce the issues into consumable information for executives / board members.

A limitation added in 2014 to get around a rejection. A sentence in a specification that describes the invention more narrowly than the claim does. An expert whose opinion today does not match what the inventor wrote at the time. These are small and they are worth more than volume.

The alternative is pressure applied everywhere at once, which is what a case looks like when nobody has found the real point yet. It is expensive, it is exhausting, and it usually ends in a number chosen because everyone is tired.

Finding the point takes reading. Using it takes restraint, because the moment to apply it is rarely the moment you find it.

He was also very effective at applying pressure at the right points, without letting the matter spiral into unnecessary cost or complexity.

Nobody is calm at a hearing because they are a calm person. They are calm because the cross examination was written in March, the exhibit was found in April, and the answer to the question that just landed was rehearsed out loud in a conference room with somebody trying to break it.

Preparation is also the only honest way to control cost. Work done early is cheap and done once. The same work done under a deadline is done three times, at night, by more people.

The visible part of this for a client is small and steady: knowing what is coming next, and never learning about a filing after it happened.

He meticulously prepared every detail, anticipated opposing counsel's moves with remarkable foresight, and presented our case with compelling clarity and persuasive power that clearly resonated with the judge and jury.

A jury is a classroom that did not volunteer. Twelve people who would rather be at work are asked to learn a technology in a few days, from someone they have no reason to trust, while another lawyer explains it differently.

The practice behind that came first: undergraduate business law, graduate mathematics and an engineering lab, all taught at the University of Missouri before the practice of law began. Later came Patent Academy, a training program for patent lawyers built at Shook, Hardy & Bacon, and years of continuing legal education for other lawyers.

Teaching a subject is the fastest way to find out which parts of it you only think you understand. That is useful before a hearing and it is useful in the first meeting with your engineers.

Jesse has a knack for working and studying intentionally and breaking down into bite-size pieces information that would not otherwise be easily digestible.

The comfort with tools is old. ProSolv, a computer services company started to help pay for college, then a stretch as an analyst at Accenture, then engineering work on control systems and microelectronics. More recently, executive education at Wharton on the economics of blockchain and digital assets, and daily use of artificial intelligence in the work now.

What that buys a client is speed on the parts of a case that are volume rather than thought: finding the document, checking the citation, reading more of the record in less time. What it does not buy is the decision about what any of it means, and treating a tool as an answer is how a case gets lost quietly.

The honest version is that technology makes the reading cheaper, which makes it possible to actually do all of it.

Jesse's technical abilities are second to none. He consistently demonstrates a command of all aspects of a case and leverages his skills as a patent prosecutor to great effect in litigation.