Cliff A. Maier

As a registered patent attorney with a PhD in electrical engineering, Cliff advises clients on issues involving semiconductors, cryptography, biometrics, wireless communications, consumer electronics, human-machine interaction, and networking, including:

• Patent litigations
• Intellectual property opinions, including with respect to freedom-to-operate, infringement, and invalidity
• Building intellectual property portfolios and defensive measures to help avoid unwanted litigations, especially for start-up companies
• Intellectual property licensing disputes, as well as other disputes and transactions involving technology

Prior to joining Mayer Brown, Cliff designed some of the world's fastest microprocessors for a decade, working as an engineer and technical manager for two large microprocessor design firms and a Silicon Valley start-up. As an engineer, Cliff worked in nearly every microprocessor engineering role, including circuit and physical design, logic design, microarchitecture, physical and logical verification and analysis, testing, electronic packaging, and instruction set architecture. His microprocessor design experience encompasses silicon, III-V materials, and both bipolar and CMOS logic and circuit design. He also created Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools, managing the EDA team at a major microprocessor design company.

In addition to hardware design, Cliff has decades of experience in software engineering, including current technologies such as smartphone app coding, server-side databases, and over a dozen programming languages. Cliff has authored and co-authored numerous papers on microprocessor design, published in the Journal of Solid State Circuits and other IEEE publications.

• An electronics company in Eastern District of Texas against an assertion by Plaintiff of a digital watermarking patent: favorable settlement.
• An electronics company in Northern District of Alabama against an assertion by Plaintiff of a light-emitting diode patent: plaintiff withdrew its claims.
• An electronics company in Northern District of Georgia against assertions by Plaintiff of automated check cashing machine patents: final judgment of non-infringement and invalidity, affirmed on appeal.
• An electronics company in an international arbitration relating to a dispute as to a cross-licensing agreement: final ruling in client's favor.

He also:

• Led the team representing a financial services technology company in a declaratory judgment action in the Eastern District of Virginia involving cross-assertion of business method patents: favorable settlement.

Copyright Litigation

Represented:

• A shoe manufacturer and retailers in Central District of California against assertions by Plaintiff of infringement of a copyright on a fabric pattern: favorable settlement.