Attorney Profiles

Benjamin Erlick practices in the areas of intellectual property law and civil litigation. His practice is primarily focused on patent litigation, trade secret, and trademark law. 

Patents

Mr. Erlick has been licensed to practice before the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) since 2002, initially as a Patent Agent and currently as a Patent Attorney. He has experience in both of the two major areas of patent practice:

• Patent prosecution (including determining whether innovations and technologies may be patentable, drafting and filing applications to obtain patents in the United States and in other countries throughout the world, and responding to office actions to overcome patent examiners' objections and rejections), and
• Patent litigation (including filing or defending lawsuits involving alleged patent infringement, or resolving potential patent related conflicts and issues through licensing or alternative methods of dispute resolution).

Mr. Erlick's intellectual property experience covers a wide variety of technical fields, including: mechanical, electromechanical, computer software, semi-conductor hardware, alternative energy, communications, medical devices, and business methods. He is a registered Professional Engineer (P.E.) in Arizona, with proficiency in civil engineering. He also has a Masters degree in business administration.

Mr. Erlick's patent litigation practice includes:

• Infringement analysis (evaluating whether a particular patent may be infringed by a particular product, apparatus, method, or process, etc.). This involves analyzing the scope of patent claims defined by the claim elements in conjunction with the teachings of the specification, and determining whether the alleged infringing product embodies/practices all the claimed elements of the patent.
• Invalidity analysis (evaluating whether a facially valid and issued patent may ultimately be held invalid and unenforceable as a result of defects in the patent, such as inventorship issues, indefiniteness, anticipation or obviousness due to prior art, insufficient enablement, or other issues).

Mr. Erlick is also available to counsel clients on whether there may be legal and effective ways to work around or design around particular patents to avoid infringement, or whether a patent has broad enough claims to encompass, and therefore prevent, a particular workaround.

Trademarks

Mr. Erlick's trademark practice includes:

• Counseling clients on legal issues to consider when creating and selecting trademarks,
• Trademark searching to identify potential issues,
• Registration of trademarks, and
• Renewal of trademarks (including filing section 8 declarations of continued use, section 9 applications for renewal, and section 15 declarations of incontestability).

Additional Background

In law school, Mr. Erlick was elected President of the Student Bar Association, and was appointed Chief Justice of the Honor Court, Managing Editor of the Phoenix Law Review, and Chair of the Moot Court Honor Board.  He was also a member of the intellectual property law society.