Universities & Research Institutions

Overview

Universities and research institutions are a unique environment for the development, capture and commercialization of new intellectual property assets. Since our founding, we have been dedicated to developing one of the nation’s strongest university and institution practices. In the last ten years, we have handled thousands of patent, trademark, copyright and related dispute matters for these clients. Many of our clients are among the world’s highest-ranked grantees of U.S. utility patents and the highest generators of extramural research funding.

As one of the nation’s most prominent IP firms in the university and institutional research space, we work side-by-side with professors, researchers, licensing managers, and technology commercialization offices (“TCO’s”) at universities and research institutions across the United States. A key to our success is understanding and serving the needs of university and institutional TCO’s. These include having attorneys and agents who hold advanced technical, scientific and engineering degrees in all of the technology areas common for innovation in the university and institution environment. University professors and research professional inventors are highly sophisticated scientists; we have the capabilities to efficiently speak their language and engage their creative minds.

But while highly sophisticated scientific and legal expertise are critical for working with these inventors—there is the need to couple this with reasonable pricing given the frequent budgetary constraints under which TCO’s operate. This is where MCC truly excels in representing these entities.  We deliver top legal and science backgrounds with budget flexibility to establish true partnerships with our university and research institution clients. Put simply, our clients within this industry know they can call on us to handle most any invention and inventor, with great quality and attention to service, and stay within the budgetary requirements.

In addition to preparing and filing patent applications, we frequently work with university and research institution clients in performing comprehensive patentability analyses, preparing competitive landscape studies, performing inventorship determinations, preparing and prosecuting trademark and copyright applications, providing ownership analyses, licensing counseling, and IP disputes. In all our work, our goal is to obtain protection that best supports the commercial and strategic value of the innovation, with careful regard to any budgetary constraints.