Garvey, Smith & Nehrbass, Patent Attorneys, L.L.C.

Focus and practice areas

Garvey, Smith & Nehrbass keeps its work inside one field: intellectual property. The firm handles patents, trademarks, copyrights, and trade secrets, along with the licensing and litigation that grow out of them.

On the patent side, the firm obtains utility, design, and plant patents. Those three categories cover different things. Utility patents protect how something works, design patents protect how it looks, and plant patents cover new varieties of asexually reproduced plants.

The firm also handles trademark and copyright prosecution, and it works for clients in the United States and abroad. Its site states the firm has obtained more than 1,500 US patents for clients since 1998.

How the team is built

Every attorney at the firm is a registered patent attorney. That registration is separate from a law license. It requires passing a Patent and Trademark Office examination and holding a qualifying technical or scientific degree, which is why patent practice draws lawyers with science and engineering backgrounds.

The degrees held across the firm run through civil engineering, physics, chemistry, biology, genetics, neuroscience, and biomedical engineering. In my opinion, that spread matters more in patent work than in most areas of law, because a patent application has to describe an invention accurately enough for an examiner in that technical art unit to evaluate it.

The founding partners

Charles C. Garvey, Jr. co-founded the firm and has more than 45 years in intellectual property law. He has acted as lead counsel in patent lawsuits, and his office practice covers technology transfer agreements and legal opinions on patentability and other IP questions.

Seth M. Nehrbass has worked on patent prosecution since 1982. He began as a patent examiner at the Patent and Trademark Office before moving into private practice, which gives him a view of the process from the government side. His technical background is in physics, and he has prosecuted applications in chemistry, mechanical engineering, electronics, medicine, and medical devices. He is fluent in French and Spanish and has a working knowledge of Portuguese and Italian.

Gregory C. Smith, the third founder, is now Of Counsel and retired on 31 December 2025. He has over 40 years in IP law as an attorney and a lecturer. His work concentrates on patent and trademark litigation in state and federal courts and on prosecution before the USPTO. He earned his law degree at Loyola University New Orleans and holds a bachelor's degree in chemistry and English.

The attorneys who carry the current work

Jacqueline M. Daspit is an equity partner. She first worked at the firm from 2006 to 2008, then moved in-house at Bard Peripheral Vascular, now part of Becton, Dickinson & Company, where she oversaw innovation and intellectual property protection. She has since rejoined. She was born and raised in New Orleans, attended Mercy Academy High School, and holds a bachelor's degree in biochemistry with a minor. Time spent inside a medical device company gives an attorney a working sense of how patent decisions get made on a product timeline.

Vanessa M. D'Souza graduated from Tulane Law School in 2008, where she focused on intellectual property and served as Editor-in-Chief of Volume 10 of the Tulane Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property. Her undergraduate degree is a B.S. in neuroscience with a business minor, also from Tulane, in 2003. She joined the firm as a law clerk in 2007 and became an attorney with it.

Julia M. FitzPatrick became a patent attorney in 2007. She graduated from the University of Utah, S.J. Quinney College of Law in 2006, after an undergraduate degree in genetics from the University of Georgia in 2000. She clerked for a judge on the Utah Court of Appeals and worked at Louisiana law firms before joining in 2011. She is licensed in Louisiana.

Julie Rabalais Chauvin was born and raised in New Orleans. She holds a B.S. in biomedical engineering from the University of Virginia and a law degree from the University of Florida Levin College of Law. She worked as a judicial intern in the Eastern District of Louisiana and in the U.S.Attorney's Office for the Middle District of Florida, and she worked in a research role.

Fabian M. Nehrbass graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2008 with a B.S. in biology, a chemistry minor, and a B.A. in political science. He earned his J.D. at LSU Law School in 2013, where he was a member of the Louisiana Law Review and Order of the Coif. He worked at King, Krebs & Jurgens, mostly on litigation, before joining the firm in 2018.

What a patent matter usually involves

Patent prosecution is a written negotiation with a government agency. An applicant files a specification and claims, an examiner at the USPTO searches prior art, and the two sides exchange office actions and responses until the claims are allowed or the application is abandoned. The process commonly runs for years.

Trademark registration follows a different track. An application goes to an examining attorney, then to publication, where third parties get a window to oppose. Copyright registration is faster and mostly administrative, though registration is what unlocks statutory damages in US infringement suits.

Trade secrets have no registration at all. Protection depends on the steps a company actually takes to keep information confidential, which puts the legal work into agreements, internal policy, and litigation when something leaks.

Reach and working arrangements

The firm has its main office in downtown New Orleans and a Northshore office in Mandeville that operates by appointment. The Mandeville location covers the parishes north of Lake Pontchartrain.

The firm often works alongside general practice law firms, handling the intellectual property portion of those firms' client matters. That referral relationship is common in patent practice, since the registration requirement means a general litigator cannot appear before the USPTO without it.

As a reviewer, the clearest fact on this listing is the one about credentials: the firm applies the registered patent attorney requirement to every lawyer on its roster, and it has done patent work under the same name since 1 July 1998.