Michael Renaud
Member / Chair, Intellectual Property Division, Mintz
[email protected]
Michael is recognized as one of the World’s Leading IP Strategists by Intellectual Asset Magazine, appearing in its 2021 inaugural and 2022 edition of the Strategy 300 Global Leaders guide, and repeatedly in its annual IAM Strategy 300 and IAM Patent 1000 publications. He is annually included in leading attorney lists produced by Managing Intellectual Property and Chambers USA, and in 2021 and 2022 was a finalist for MIP’s Patent Litigator of the Year in Massachusetts.
Michael is driven to help his clients attain their business objectives, and all of his advice is structured around clients’ overall business goals, intersecting those with strategic recommendations for the development, expansion, and protection of their IP assets. He and his team enforce patent and trade secret rights, defend against claims of patent infringement and trade secret theft, and drive high-value patent transactions. His cutting-edge work on SEP valuation and enforcement is supported by his unmatched ability to identify untapped assets and value drivers.
Michael is an experienced litigator and the central tactician in developing and implementing multinational enforcement, licensing, and litigation strategies. He and his teams help clients realize significant value by identifying patent assets that can be enforced to protect clients’ competitive positions and generate licensing revenue. Such enforcement and licensing efforts today require an attorney like Michael who can manage parallel litigations in U.S. Federal District Courts, in front of the International Trade Commission (ITC), and in global jurisdictions including China, Europe, and the UK. Recent successful Mintz-coordinated global efforts have involved regional IP courts in Shanghai, China, Brazil, and in Dusseldorf and Mannheim, Germany, in addition to multiple U.S. venues. As part of the strategic use of litigation in these matters, Michael and the Mintz team have been highly successful in defending against inter partes review (IPR) petitions filed by accused infringers attempting to invalidate clients’ patents.
Michael represents clients accused of infringement, and his success in these matters is informed by his full understanding of how plaintiff cases are developed and, in turn, how to strategically approach them. His team develops defense strategies that align with clients’ goals for each matter, whether to get out quickly or fight hard to establish a reputation as a difficult defendant. The team has successfully used Alice motions to defuse efforts by serial plaintiffs to attack clients’ innovative positions in the marketplace, often eliminating threats early to limit clients’ financial risk.
Michael also advises clients on patent portfolio assessment, conducts IP due diligence in connection with transactions, and leads negotiations in the purchase, sale, and license of patent assets. Michael counsels private equity firms and venture capital funds on the quality and value of IP assets in which they are considering investing. He also uses his decades of experience in patent valuation to help clients identify patents of value in their portfolio and helps position them for a successful sale or negotiated licensing transactions, and represents clients seeking to strengthen their own portfolios through the acquisition of additional assets. Michael’s leadership on such strategic transactions has netted clients significant revenue and strengthened their competitive positions in the marketplace.
He handles complex trade secret matters involving clients’ crown jewel innovations, emphasizing the protection of those rights in the context of failed contractual agreements. Michael recognizes the critical importance of trade secrets to many clients’ overall IP strategies and helps to preserve trade secrets rights through counseling, negotiated transactions, and litigation. He represents U.S. and non-U.S. companies on both sides of trade secrets disputes, with particular expertise in representing innovative companies involved in joint development agreements and other collaborative contractual arrangements with global entities. His technical expertise and industry knowledge, successes in Federal district courts, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC), and at the ITC, and strategic business insights make him particularly well-suited to navigating the multifaceted issues that are often central to trade secret actions.
As firmwide Chair of the Intellectual Property Division, Michael leads an international team of IP prosecutors, litigators, and transaction specialists who are focused on delivering exceptional results for clients in IPRs, the (ITC), district court defense, trade secrets, SEP/FRAND, life sciences patent litigation and artificial intelligence, arbitration, buy and sell-side IP transactions, and cryptocurrency and blockchain. Michael brings together broad industry knowledge and a keen eye for trend-spotting, to make servicing clients across key industry verticals a main point of focus for the Division.
