Robert Taylor Image

Robert Taylor

Founder & Owner, RPT Legal Strategies

Robert Taylor is the founder and owner of RPT Legal Strategies PC in San Francisco and Palo Alto, providing legal and business advice to companies and investors with respect to all aspects of intellectual property, competition law and related fields of endeavor.
For more than 40 years, Bob has focused primarily on intellectual property litigation, serving as lead trial counsel and/or appellate counsel in dozens of patent, copyright, trade secret and antitrust cases involving a wide range of technologies and industries. He is a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers and a Lifetime Member of the American Law Institute.

Bob has written and lectured extensively on the business and legal problems associated with both intellectual property protection and the laws related to competition. He served for several years as the co-chair of the Antitrust Committee of Intellectual Property Owners Association and also as a Member of IPO’s Amicus Committee. Bob served as a member of the 1992 Commission on Patent Law Reform. He is a former chair of the Antitrust Section of American Bar Association and a long-time member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He is one of the founding board members for the U.S. Intellectual Property Alliance and is member of the Advisory Board to the Alliance of U.S. Startups and Inventors for Jobs.

Recent Articles by Robert Taylor

USIJ Responds to Remarks Made by Senator Leahy on World IP Day Regarding Prior USPTO Administration

In celebration of last month’s World IP Day, Senate Judiciary Committee Intellectual Property Subcommittee Chairman Patrick Leahy expressed his support for a determined effort to encourage more individuals and small companies across this country to invent new technologies and products. He also noted the need for the U.S. patent system to incentivize this effort. The Alliance of U.S. Startups and Inventors for Jobs (USIJ) strongly supports Chairman Leahy’s important objective of empowering startups and inventors, and we frankly think it has been underappreciated for many years…. However, we are concerned with one point raised by Senator Leahy without providing much detail – that the prior Administration took “steps to undermine the Leahy-Smith Act.”

A Short History Lesson on Patent Policy

Starting before World War II and continuing throughout the 1950s, 60s and 70s, short sighted and now discredited government antitrust policies, coupled with judicial hostility toward patent enforcement and patent licensing, converged to reduce the enforceability of patents and to restrict the ability of patent owners to license their inventions. The result: foreign competitors began to capture entire industries that should have been dominated by U.S. companies that had pioneered the relevant technologies.

Past Events with Robert Taylor

IPWatchdog LIVE 2021

September 12-14, 2021