Collard & Roe, P.C.

Focus and practice areas

The firm works in intellectual property law from an office in Roslyn, New York. It handles patent, trademark and copyright matters. The practice areas it lists are utility patents, design patents, trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets and intellectual property litigation. That set covers most of the legal tools a business or an inventor uses to protect an idea.

Utility patents and design patents guard different things. A utility patent protects how an invention works. A design patent protects how a product looks. Many products carry both, so a firm that files each type can cover a single item from two angles.

How the work moves

Day-to-day work at Collard & Roe includes prosecution, licensing, litigation and maintenance. Prosecution is the drafting of an application and the back and forth with a government office until the right grants. Licensing is the process of letting another party use a protected right under agreed terms. Maintenance keeps a granted right alive through the fees and filings that fall due across its life.

The firm also protects trade secrets and domain names, and its copyright work covers registration and enforcement of original material. The firm prepares opinions on infringement allegations and freedom to operate requests as well. A freedom to operate opinion looks at whether a planned product runs into rights someone else already holds. That review matters most before a company commits money to a launch.

Intellectual property litigation is the last of the listed areas. It covers court disputes over whether a right was infringed and whether it holds up as valid. Patent litigation runs in federal court, where the technical detail from prosecution often returns as evidence. A firm that both files rights and litigates them keeps the same technical knowledge in play when a dispute reaches court.

How the team is built

The site names seven attorneys, each with a stated title. Frederick J. Dorchak is a principal and the firm's president. Elizabeth C. Richter and William C. Collard are also principals. Allison C. Collard, the founder, is of counsel, a title that usually marks a senior lawyer with a continuing link to the firm.

Robert Broder and Brittany K. Singh are senior trademark attorneys, and Edward J. Callaghan is an associate. In my opinion, a roster that names dedicated trademark counsel apart from the patent principals tells you the firm treats those two areas as separate crafts, which they are. Trademark practice and patent practice run on separate rules and deadlines. A team that staffs both under one roof can keep a client's brand and its inventions on the same desk.

Technical fields the patent work covers

Patent work depends on matching an attorney's technical background to the invention at hand. The firm states that its patent fields include mechanics, chemistry, engineering, computer science and biotechnology. Those reach both the mechanical and the life science ends of a typical patent docket.

A patent examiner reads an application the way a trained engineer or scientist would. An examiner tests claims in chemistry on different ground from claims in software. The wording that wins a biotechnology patent looks little like the wording that wins one for a machine part. A firm that names several fields signals it can put a reader with the right training on each file.

The firm's ability to draft across these fields also shapes how it handles licensing and litigation. An attorney who understands the science behind a claim can read a competitor's product and judge how close it sits. That reading feeds the opinions the firm writes and the cases it argues.

Working with clients abroad

Much patent and trademark work crosses borders, and the firm builds for that. It coordinates with foreign associates in more than 70 countries across six continents. A foreign associate is a local lawyer who files and argues a matter inside their own country's office, and who works from instructions the home firm sends. The home firm keeps the strategy consistent while the local lawyer meets each country's rules.

Collard & Roe processes national stage PCT applications, Hague Design applications and Madrid applications, the three international systems that let a single filing reach many countries. The PCT route handles patents, the Hague system handles industrial designs, and the Madrid system handles trademarks. The firm also handles U.S. applications that claim foreign priority, where an earlier filing abroad sets the date that counts. Staff members are fluent in German, Russian and Spanish, which helps when instructions pass between offices.

What the record shows

The firm has represented clients since 1966. It states it has obtained more than 22,000 patents and more than 22,000 trademarks for clients over that history. As a reviewer, I read those figures as a measure of volume built up across nearly six decades of filing work, and the even split between the two numbers fits a firm that gives patents and trademarks equal weight.

The client base includes individual inventors, U.S. companies and multinational corporations. That mix fits a firm that files a single application and manages a large portfolio in the same week. The listed practice areas and the attorney titles point to the same two areas, patent work and trademark work, with copyright, trade secret and litigation services beside them.