Ms. Elizabeth Brannen, JD
Partner
Stris & Maher LLP
Elizabeth Rogers Brannen leads the firm’s intellectual property litigation practice. Immediately prior to joining the firm, Ms. Brannen was the Director of Intellectual Property at Barnes & Noble. She was previously Corporate Counsel in Oracle’s litigation group and has spent over a decade as a litigator in elite private practice.
After a Federal Circuit clerkship early in her career, Ms. Brannen became an expert in every stage of patent litigation. Before going in-house several years ago, she successfully resolved, as outside litigation counsel, a wide variety of patent cases in federal courts throughout the United States. At Oracle and then Barnes & Noble, she continued helping companies defeat baseless patent and copyright allegations. Ms. Brannen has experience litigating technology relating to eCommerce, Java, Android, global business applications, middleware, server-management, and other software, as well as hardware including medical devices, blade and rack-mount servers, storage systems, tablets, and mechanical devices. She has achieved successful summary judgment rulings, including one for patent non-infringement where she argued her motion the same day as the initial case management conference.
Since joining Stris & Maher, Ms. Brannen has counseled multiple Fortune clients and closely-held companies with respect to infringement allegations prior to and during litigation, on both the defense and enforcement side, and helped secure multiple resolutions without protracted litigation. She also led the firm’s recent successful effort to defeat a copyright lawsuit involving cloud storage of digital files and defended the victory at oral argument before the Second Circuit, as well as its recent successful effort to win summary judgment dismissing Ohio right of privacy claims.
Given her record of success, adversaries remain inclined to cooperate with Ms. Brannen. She has personally negotiated complete walkaways, including one in a heavily litigated patent matter in which the plaintiff sought tens of millions of dollars in alleged damages. She has also achieved countless favorable settlements. On the enforcement side, she has obtained agreements to cease and desist from trademark infringement without litigation. She has also resolved, on favorable terms, disputes concerning alleged unauthorized use of a variety of things ranging from proprietary third-party software that was considered (but rejected) during product development, to the alleged misappropriation of photographs from a major motion picture, to microdermabrasion technology allegedly incorporated into medical equipment in violation of patent rights.
Ms. Brannen received her J.D. from Harvard Law School, with honors, and her B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, magna cum laude, where, together with Peter Stris, she won the National Debating Championship.
