Richard L. Schwaab is a retired partner¡¡of the Washington, D.C. and Milwaukee offices of Foley & Lardner LLP. Mr. Schwaab counseled clients on domestic and international patent procurement, licensing, and enforcement, as well as on the protection and licensing of commercial trade secrets. His former clients are involved in a wide spectrum of industries, including biotechnology, medical, chemical, pharmaceutical, electrical, and mechanical.
With more than 20 years of experience representing clients in patent infringement disputes, Mr. Schwaab has prepared scores of patent infringement and validity opinions. He is occasionally called upon to testify as a patent law expert in infringement litigation. A portion of his practice also was devoted to interference litigation, which includes briefing and arguing cases such as the landmark CCPA case, Squires v. Corbett, which he argued in 1977.
Mr. Schwaab has authored and co-authored many books, including a six-volume treatise on U.S. Patent Practice, a three-volume work on international patent law, and a single-volume work relating to worldwide protection of biotechnology-related intellectual property. He has lectured internationally to business, professional and legal groups on a wide variety of intellectual property topics, with particular emphasis on U.S. patent enforcement and strategies for worldwide protection of intellectual property under the Patent Cooperation Treaty and the European Patent Convention. He has worked extensively in Japan and in Germany, where he had a post-law-school fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Patent, Copyright, and Competition Law.
Mr. Schwaab currently is an adjunct professor of law at George Mason University Law School (since 1990), and served as a professorial lecturer of law at the George Washington University between 1978 and 1988. He has participated extensively in teaching continuing legal education courses and has helped prepare nearly 2,000 candidates for the Patent and Trademark Office Bar Exam as a principal lecturer in a bar review program.
In recognition of his achievements, Mr. Schwaab was Peer Review Rated as AV® Preeminent™, the highest performance rating in Martindale-Hubbell's peer review rating system.
A member of the American Bar Association and the American Intellectual Property Law Association, Mr. Schwaab also has been an active member of the Virginia State Bar Association, serving on its Board of Governors for a four-year term. He is a member of the American Society of International Law, the International Patent and Trademark Association, the Licensing Executives Society, and the German Industrial Property and Copyright Society.
Mr. Schwaab graduated from the University of Wisconsin ¨C Madison (B.S., with honors, chemical engineering, 1967) and the George Washington University Law School (J.D., cum laude, 1971; LL.M., highest honors, international law, 1979). He was a member of the George Washington Law Review and is among the 73 U.S. notable patent lawyers listed in Who's Who Legal: The International Who's Who of Business Lawyers.
He is admitted to practice in Virginia, the District of Columbia, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and before the U.S. Supreme Court and U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.