Resources

The following three professionals can provide legal advice regarding procuring, enforcing, and licensing intellectual property rights in North America. They are not affiliated with one another; however, they provide complementary services.

Ron Craig Fish: U.S. registered patent attorney; licensed to practice law in California

BSEE (Northwestern University)
J.D. (University of California Hastings College of Law)

Mr. Fish has 25 years of practice which includes all aspects of patent, copyright and trademark counseling with particular emphasis on high technology patent practice and litigation for the electronics, software, and medical instrumentation industries. Prior to starting his own practice, Mr. Fish was a partner at a couple of well-known law firms and worked as patent counsel at major electronics companies. Mr. Fish currently represents several domestic and international corporations and universities.

Mr. Fish's practice includes: licensing, and patent, copyright and trademark prosecution and litigation in the federal courts and the International Trade Commission, with an emphasis on high tech electronics and software issues. Mr. Fish also has experience in reissues and reexamination proceedings, and contested proceedings in patent and trademark offices around the world including trademark oppositions and cancellation proceedings, obtaining patents and trademarks worldwide, trade secret protection, and seeking remedies for misappropriation and deceptive trade practices.

Elizabeth Chien-Hale: U.S. registered patent attorney; licensed to practice law in California, the District of Columbia, and Hawaii.

BSME (University of California, Berkeley)
M.A. (Computational Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley)
J.D. (University of Hawaii, Richardson School of Law)
LL.M. (International and Comparative Law, Georgetown University Law Center)

Ms. Chien-Hale has substantial technical knowledge in a variety of electrical and electro-mechanical arts, having drafted and prosecuted patent applications in telecommunication, software, wireless and Internet-enabled devices, language-based data processing, semiconductor processing and computer-related mechanical devices. She was also involved in a number of intellectual property litigation cases, including cases in the International Trade Commission and the U.S. District Court, relating to patent infringements and trade secrets violation.

Ms. Chien-Hale has lectured and written, in both English and Chinese, on the topics of intellectual property protection and international law. She also teaches as an adjunct faculty at local universities in the Bay Area. She is active in professional organizations, currently chairing a committee on cooperation with foreign patent offices in the Intellectual Property Law Section of the American Bar Association.

Karen J. Tang: patent agent, registered before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the Chinese Patent Office

MSEE (California State University, Long Beach)
BSEE (Northern Jiatong University, Beijing, China)

Ms. Tang has experience procuring patents both in China and the United States. Prior to coming to the United States for her Master's degree in electrical engineering, Ms. Tang worked as a patent agent at the CCPIT Patent and Trademark Office, one of the oldest intellectual property law establishments in China, for a number of years.

Ms. Tang is also an experiences electrical and software engineer, having worked both in the United States and China. She has worked on projects designing and maintaining Visual C++/Windows 98 multithreaded and multilingual GUI configuration program for satellite and cable receivers, utility program to monitor clusters of networked video servers for the broadcast industry, real-time, multi-tasking and multi-processing telecommunication software for Automatic Call
Distributor system, and electrical system for new module locomotive.

Asia

Currently the Institute does not provide names of legal professionals in Asia. Inquiries regarding intellectual property protection in Asia made through the Institute will be referred to law firms in that particular country in Asia.