Darren Schwiebert: Fredrikson & Byron Shareholder in Litigation and Intellectual Property Practice Groups

Summary

Darren Schwiebert is a Shareholder at Fredrikson & Byron, P.A., a Minneapolis-based law firm with more than 300 attorneys. He is a member of the firm's Litigation, Intellectual Property Litigation, and Intellectual Property practice groups.

Darren specializes in commercial litigation and intellectual property litigation, including patent and trademark infringement, trade secret misappropriation, copyright infringement, and dilution. He also regularly represents clients in contract disputes, class actions, and other business disputes. Additionally, he provides counseling and advice in the areas of trademark, trade secret protection, copyright, and unfair competition.

Prior to joining Fredrikson & Byron, Darren was a partner at a large, international law firm. He was also a law clerk to the Hon. Patrica Seitz of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida.

Darren has successfully handled numerous patent, copyright, trademark, and trade secret cases. He has represented clients of various sizes, ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies, in industries such as telecommunications, medical devices, manufacturing, software, apparel, and consumer products.

Darren Schwiebert is a Shareholder at Fredrikson & Byron, P.A., a Minneapolis-based law firm with extensive legal experience in patent, copyright, trademark, and trade secret disputes. Darren specializes in intellectual property litigation and has represented clients from startups to Fortune 500 companies. He regularly handles patent infringement, trademark infringement, trade secret misappropriation, copyright infringement, and dilution cases. Also, he has extensive experience in contract disputes, class actions, and other business disputes. Darren is a member of the Fredrikson & Byron Litigation, Intellectual Property Litigation, and Intellectual Property practice groups and previously served as a partner at a large, international law firm and law clerk to the Hon. Patricia Seitz of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. With his diverse experience and expertise, Darren Schwiebert is well-regarded for his ability to provide effective legal solutions in patent, copyright, trademark, and trade secret matters.
 

Darren Schwiebert, Fredrikson & Byron Shareholder

Darren Schwiebert is a Shareholder in the Minneapolis office of Fredrikson & Byron, P.A., a leading Midwest law firm, and is a member of the firm's Litigation, Intellectual Property Litigation, and Intellectual Property practice groups. He has extensive experience with patent, trademark and copyright disputes and is also an experienced trial lawyer who has successfully argued cases before state and federal trial and appellate courts throughout the United States.
 

Intellectual Property Litigation Practice

Darren Schwiebert is a seasoned litigator in the Fredrikson & Byron Intellectual Property Litigation practice. He represents clients in intellectual property litigation of all types, including copyright, trade secret, trademark, and patent cases. He regularly appears in state and federal courts and handles appeals before the US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. He also handles appeals to the US Supreme Court.
 

Legal Background and Experience

Darren Schwiebert received his J.D. summa cum laude from South Texas College of Law in 1983, and his B.A. magna cum laude from the University of Central Oklahoma in 1980. After law school, he clerked for Chief Judge William J. Holloway, Jr. of the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. He is a member of the American Bar Association, the Minnesota Bar Association. He is also an adjunct professor of intellectual property law at the University of St. Thomas School of Law, where he has taught since 1989.
 

Intellectual Property Litigation Experience

Mr. Schwiebert has more than three decades of experience in the practice of Intellectual Property Litigation. With an expertise in patents, trademarks and copyrights, he has successfully represented clients in a variety of disputes, including those involving technology licensing and infringement, domain name disputes, trade secret misappropriation, trademark registration and infringement, and copyright claims. In addition to litigation, he handles many other Intellectual Property matters, such as trademark registration, copyright protection and licensing agreements.

While in law school, Darren Schwiebert became fascinated by the intersection of law and technology. He thought he would go into insurance abrogation because he liked studying case law involving insurance companies who had paid out claims and then found a way to recoup their losses by discovering the cause of a fire, for example, or a car crash.
 

But when Schwiebert worked on his first patent case, he knew he was hooked. Patent law combined his love of the law with his interest in the latest technologies. And it allowed him to work with some brilliant inventors fighting to protect their inventions. While his practice predominantly focuses on patents and intellectual property litigation, he also handles trade-secret cases and copyright law.

"For me, patent litigation is entirely about the toys, the technology," Schwiebert told LawCrossing. "It amazes me — the opportunity that I get to learn about all of these technologies as it relates to these cases."

As a result, Schwiebert has become somewhat of an expert in a vast array of products, including high-performance snowmobiles, scoreboard displays, and MRI technology. Sometimes - as with MRI technology - Schwiebert defends a lone David inventor up against a corporate Goliath, but generally the parties who choose to sue over patents are companies because of the high cost of litigation.

Schwiebert advises attorneys interested in patent law not to be intimidated by the science and says there's no Harvard Law School.

"Part of what patent cases are about is explaining to a judge or jury the technology in a format that they not only understand, but that they can apply legal doctrines to," he said. "Maybe when you get to the higher end of the technology — for example, the MRI technology — it may take me longer to understand the core science than somebody who has exposure to that particular science before. But all of these cases are about understanding and learning what the technology is."

Schwiebert, who works with Fredrikson & Byron in Minnesota, says the legal profession has been rapidly catching up to new technologies in recent years. As a member of his firm's technology committee, he is the litigation person in charge of technology for the litigation group and helps keep attorneys abreast of ways they can use technology in their cases, whether through Flash presentations or electronic files.

He works closely with the firm's litigation support administrator, Chad Papenfuss (see this week's Legal Staff profile), on studying new technology and how it impacts litigation. The two men are not IT staff, so don't call them if your keyboard is jammed.

"There are kind of two aspects to that. The first is the more glamorous, which is the use of technology in court proceedings and technology for presentations to jurors, presentations to clients, presentations to judges," he said. "And then the other side of it, which is less glamorous and equally important, is the technology that supports the litigation process — from imaging documents and document databases to managing large document-intensive litigation to real-time deposition transcripts that can be manipulated and annotated to assist in depositions."

Electronic Discovery is becoming an increasingly important area of law for the firm, especially as more and more documents are filed and stored electronically. Schwiebert says there are many gray areas concerning electronic data that are gaining prominence in patent and other types of litigation. A traditional paper document, for instance, is different from a printout of an electronic document because certain data, called meta data, may be missing from the printout.

When you print out an email, you will not see who the email went to if the recipient was "BCC'd" or blind copied. Schwiebert thinks we will see an increasing number of cases where computer hard drives are subpoenaed by forensic experts to recover data or emails believed to have been deleted.

"A lot of times, the meta data will contain information about who accessed it and when they accessed it. In patent litigation, that type of information can be valuable," particularly when establishing timelines in a case, Schwiebert said. "I'm always amazed at what people might put in an email that they might not put in a letter. And those are great sources for litigation. It's funny. Maybe it's just human nature, but when you type a letter, it seems that people have a filter coming in that says, 'I may not want to say that or I don't mean that.' But emails are so quick, so instant. And there are some high-profile cases — a lot of them settled shortly after — where people have said things in emails that become just great evidence."

Although Schwiebert, who sits as a volunteer Conciliation Court Judge in Hennepin County about once a month, has never used personal emails in one of his cases, he says he has heard about several recently where "private" Hotmail and other accounts have been mined for data.

So be careful what you write - even in your "private" email.

Please see this article to find out if litigation is right for you: Why Most Attorneys Have No Business Being Litigators: Fifteen Reasons Why You Should Not Be a Litigator

Click here get latest In-house intellectual property opportunities near Minneapolis location.
 

• See Top 10 Reasons Most Law Firms Have No Idea How to Hire and Evaluate Patent Attorneys for more information.