LEXINGTON, Ky. — Culminating a years-long courtship, Stites & Harbison, PLLC has added all four attorneys from the specialist firm King & Schickli PLLC to its Intellectual Property & Technology (IPT) Service Group.
Warren D. Schickli and Michael S. Hargis join Stites & Harbison as members (partners) while Trevor T. Graves and Patrick M. Torre join the firm as counsel. The attorneys joined the firm July 1 and are based in Stites & Harbison’s Lexington office.
“These four are a group of very experienced and very talented IP lawyers,” said Marjorie A. Farris, chair of S&H. “We have been inviting them for awhile.”
Initial contacts regarding the just-announced move date to when the late Kennedy Helm III was chair of Stites from 1997 to 2011, Schickli said.
“The timing was just right to do it now,” Schickli said. “I’ve been doing a lot of work lately with startups” that, beyond focused IP protections, “need a wide range of associated legal work that Stites enjoys a good reputation for handling.”
These include business capitalization, employment agreements, tax advice and land use contracts.
The additional attorneys bring significant experience in patents, trademarks, copyrights, intellectual property litigation, trade secrets, and TTAB oppositions and cancellations. They also bring strong backgrounds in mechanical, electrical and chemical engineering, chemistry, animal science and agriculture.
Stites & Harbison’s IPT Service Group counsels and represents clients in securing, managing and litigating intellectual property rights. The IPT Group now has 22 attorneys across its footprint.
Stites has been growing its IPT group for the past 15 to 20 years, Farris said. It has an office in Alexandria, Va., to provide ongoing access to the U.S. Patent Office, she said.
“There is a synergy when you get a large enough group of attorneys together,” Schickli said. Intellectual property is “a really exciting area to work in. We get to work with established businesses and the university.
“I just finished writing about 500 issue patents for Ford (Motor Company) the past few years,” he said. “Some most interesting were on higher performance cars, like the Mustang. Now to get to see those come to fruition is exciting.”
Both Schickli and Graves have backgrounds in chemistry. Schickli earned his B.A. in chemistry from Denison University in Granville, Ohio, prior to earning his J.D. from the University of Kentucky (UK). Graves earned his B.S. in chemical engineering from UK prior to earning his J.D. from UK.
Hargis earned a B.S. in electrical engineering from UK prior to becoming a lawyer. He earned his J.D. from Saint Louis University School of Law. Torre’s background includes a Ph.D. in animal science and an M.S. from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville as well as a B.S. in agriculture from the University of Tennessee at Martin. He later earned his J.D. from UK.
King & Schickli was created in 1982. Stites’ origins date to 1832.
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