Fish & Richardson P.C.

Focus and practice areas

Fish & Richardson P.C. works in intellectual property law. The firm describes IP as the whole of its practice, and its published service list backs that up.

The work splits into four named groups: litigation, patent, post-grant, and trademark and copyright. Each one appears in the firm's own practice listings.

Patent work covers prosecution, which is the process of pursuing a patent through the patent office. The firm handles this alongside disputes over patents already granted.

Litigation services the firm names

The firm lists patent litigation, trademark and copyright litigation, and trade secret litigation. It also names appellate work and ITC litigation as separate services.

ITC litigation deserves a note. The International Trade Commission runs its own process for import-related IP disputes, with its own timelines and its own judges. A firm that names it as a distinct service has decided that forum matters enough to flag.

Appellate work getting its own line tells a similar story. Appeals in patent cases mostly run through the Federal Circuit, and the skills there differ from trial work.

Post-grant proceedings

The firm names three post-grant routes: inter partes review, post-grant review, and ex parte reexamination. All three happen at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board or through the patent office itself.

These proceedings challenge patents that have already issued. They have become a standard part of patent disputes over the past decade, often running in parallel with court cases. In my opinion, a firm that lists all three by name is signalling that it takes on both sides of that work.

Scale and how the firm is staffed

Fish & Richardson reports more than 375 attorneys. That number puts it among the larger IP-focused firms in the country.

The firm also reports more than 60 technology staff members. These are staff who bring scientific or engineering knowledge to the work without necessarily practising law themselves.

The firm states that its attorneys hold technical backgrounds in addition to their legal training. Patent practice makes that useful: a lawyer arguing about semiconductor design or a biologic drug needs to follow the underlying science.

Fish & Richardson's website names no individual attorneys in the material our research reached. Readers wanting to know who would handle a particular matter will need to ask the firm directly.

The Atlanta office and the wider network

The firm keeps a presence on Peachtree Street in midtown Atlanta. The office occupies one floor of a commercial tower there.

Atlanta gives the firm a base in the Southeast. The city hosts a large technology sector along with corporate headquarters across manufacturing, logistics, and healthcare, all of which generate IP work.

The firm runs 15 offices in total. In the United States those are Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Wilmington in Delaware, Houston, Minneapolis, New York, Newport Beach, San Diego, Silicon Valley in Redwood City, and Washington, D.C.

Two offices sit outside the United States: Munich in Germany and Shenzhen in China. Munich houses the European Patent Office, and Shenzhen anchors a dense electronics manufacturing region.

What the office locations suggest about the client base

The office map tracks technology and legal centres closely. Silicon Valley, Austin, and Boston are software and hardware hubs. San Diego has a heavy biotech and wireless concentration.

Wilmington and Washington, D.C. serve a different purpose. Delaware's federal court hears a large share of the nation's patent cases, and Washington puts the firm near the patent office, the ITC, and the Federal Circuit.

A client with a patent dispute in Delaware, an ITC action in Washington, and engineering staff in Shenzhen can work with one firm across all three. That kind of coverage is the practical argument for a network this size.

A history that reaches back to 1878

Frederick Perry Fish founded the firm in Boston in 1878. The website records both the year and the founder.

1878 places the firm's start in the middle of a period of heavy American patenting. The telephone patent was two years old. Edison was still working toward a practical incandescent lamp.

A firm operating continuously since then has worked through several rewrites of US patent law. The 1952 Patent Act and the 2011 America Invents Act both reshaped the field.

As a reviewer, I treat a long history as context and nothing more. It tells you the firm has lasted. It says little about how any current matter will go, and the firm's own site makes no claims on that front.

What the published record supports

The firm's website gives a clear account of what it does. Practice areas are named, the office list is complete with locations, and the headcount figures are stated plainly.

What the site does not carry, in the material our research reached, is attorney biographies. There are no names, no law schools, no admission years, no listed credentials for individual lawyers.

That gap matters for anyone choosing counsel. Much of what makes an IP team suitable for a given matter comes down to the specific people: their technical field, their courtroom record, their PTAB experience.

Prospective clients should ask for that information directly. Any firm of this size can supply the background of the attorneys who would actually staff a matter, and asking early is reasonable.

How to read a single-field practice

Fish & Richardson confines itself to intellectual property. A company needing employment advice, real estate work, or general corporate counsel will look elsewhere.

The depth that comes with that focus suits certain clients well. A business whose main asset is a patent portfolio, a brand, or a body of proprietary technical knowledge sits squarely in the firm's territory.

The four practice groups cover the arc of IP work. A company can register a trademark, prosecute a patent, defend that patent at the PTAB, and litigate infringement, all within the same firm.

The firm maintains profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook, and X. Those channels carry firm updates and offer another route to current information about the practice groups.

Where this listing lands

Fish & Richardson presents itself as an IP firm and nothing else, and its published service list is consistent with that. The practice areas, the office locations, and the technical staffing all point the same direction.

The verifiable material here is the structure of the practice rather than its outcomes. Our research found no case results, no client lists, and no published rankings on the firm's own pages.

In my opinion, that leaves a listing built on the shape of the firm: 15 offices, 375-plus attorneys, 60-plus technology staff, four IP practice groups, and a founding date of 1878.