Michael W. Farn

650-335-7823

mfarn@fenwick.com

Practice Area Lead

Patents & Emerging Technologies

Partner

Intellectual Property

Office

Silicon Valley

Practices

Industries

Education & Admissions

Ph.D., Electrical Engineering
Stanford University
NSF Graduate Fellow

J.D., with distinction
Stanford Law School

B.S., Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering
Penn State University
Graduated at the top of both classes

Admitted to practice in California

Registered to practice before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office

Michael Farn leads Fenwick's patent group. His emphasis is on the development of intellectual property assets for high technology corporations—from early stage startups to Fortune 500 companies—with particular focus on building, acquiring and managing patent portfolios and licensing technology in his law practice.

Mike has experience counseling clients in a variety of high technology industries, including optical devices, augmented reality, machine learning and artificial intelligence, signal and image processing, telecommunications, EDA and semiconductors. His expertise also includes legal process management and improvement.

Before embarking on his legal career, Mike was a member of the technical staff at M.I.T./Lincoln Laboratory. There, his primary responsibilities were to invent new optical technologies and then transfer these technologies to private corporations for commercialization. He entered the legal field in part because the attorneys supporting Mike’s activities did not adequately understand the commercial world. There was and continues to be a significant need for legal specialists who can understand and solve problems from the client’s point of view, who can explain legal risks in ordinary English, and who can relate these risks to actual commercial risk and reward.

Michael Farn is a repository of trust for today and tomorrow’s industry leaders as he looks to roll out new and innovative patent programs and gain commercial impetus from them.”

IAM Patent 1000

2020 Edition

Practices