Reid Willis

J.D., Ph.D

Reid Willis was trained as an organic chemist (B.S., Purdue University, 1979; Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1985) and worked for The Dow Chemical Company in Midland, MI as a Sr. Research Chemist right out of graduate school. He received his J.D. from Wayne State University Law School in Detroit in 2002. He joined GlaxoSmithKline in 2004 before returning to Dow for the next 15.5 years until he retired at the end of 2025.

Reid became an adjunct professor at Drexel University’s Kline School of Law in the spring of 2023, and repeated the course in patent prosecution in the spring of 2025.

Recent Articles by Reid Willis

Enanta v. Pfizer is Not About a Typo: It is About Possession of the Invention

Enanta Pharmaceuticals v. Pfizer has been widely characterized as a case that turns on the acceptance or rejection of an alleged typographical error in a provisional patent application. That characterization is inaccurate. The alleged typographical error is a distraction that obscures the fact that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit analyzed the case under the wrong legal framework. Properly understood, Enanta is not about a typo at all; rather, the dispositive question is whether the inventors possessed the invention prior to the public disclosure of the allegedly infringing compound.

July 19, 2026

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