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Matthew Dowd

Founder and Managing Partner

Dowd Scheffel PLLC

Matthew Dowd is Founder and Managing Partner at Dowd Scheffel PLLC. He focuses his skills on complex appellate and trial litigation, with an emphasis on patent and intellectual property issues.  Through his years of practice, Mr. Dowd has successfully worked on numerous high-stakes and eclectic legal matters, focusing primarily on all stages of complex patent matters (AIA proceedings, litigation, prosecution, and counseling).  Mr. Dowd’s expertise and leadership are regularly consulted, as he is frequently asked to comment in the press on leading intellectual property issues.

Mr. Dowd has substantial experience with Hatch-Waxman litigation, including all stages of opinion analysis, litigation, and appeals.  His technical background in medicinal chemistry is ideally suited for litigating pharmaceutical patents.  He has represented clients in a range of trial forums for patent disputes, such as the Eastern District of Texas and the District of Delaware, as well as the Patent Trial and Appeal Board at the USPTO.

He has argued appeals before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, the Ninth Circuit, and the D.C. Circuit, with over fifteen appeals (and briefed numerous others) before the Federal Circuit and other courts involving issues such as patent law, Hatch-Waxman, administrative law, Fifth Amendment takings, contract claims, government employment issues, and criminal law.  Most recently, in 2018, Mr. Dowd was co-counsel with the Hon. Richard Posner (ret.) of U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in an appeal before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.

Recent Articles by Matthew Dowd

Juno v. Kite: A Rare Opportunity for the Supreme Court to Grant Rehearing

The patent world is trained on the upcoming Supreme Court Amgen v. Sanofi case. That case is the first time in over 75 years that the Supreme Court is evaluating the meaning and scope of the enablement requirement of 35 U.S.C. § 112. The case offers the Court an opportunity to correct a negative trend in enablement law that has made it more difficult to protect groundbreaking, pioneering inventions. Waiting in the wings, however, is an equally important Section 112 case: . There, the petitioner sought review on whether “the ‘written description of the invention’ [is] to be measured by the statutory standard of ‘in such full, clear, concise, and exact terms as to enable any person skilled in the art to make and use the same.’” As is apparent, Juno’s written description issue is highly intertwined with the Section 112 enablement issue in Amgen v. Sanofi.

Presenting the Evidence for Patent Eligibility Reform: Part IV – Uncertainty is Burdening Litigants and Courts, Threatening U.S. Competitiveness and National Security

The current unreliability of patent-eligibility law, documented thus far here, here and here, has also created undue burdens on litigants and the courts. In this final installment, we detail how the current unreliability burdens litigants and the courts and how it is a fundamental threat to U.S. competitiveness and national security. Patent infringers now routinely raise Section 101 as a defense, often merely as a strategy to complicate and prolong the litigation, rather than as a good-faith defense with a likelihood of success. For example, one analysis found that, from 2012 to 2014 (when Alice was decided), Section 101 was raised in just two Rule 12(b)(6) motions across the country each year. In the year after Alice, that number rose to 36 motions, and by 2019, accused infringers were filing over 100 such motions each year.

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