Robert Saltzberg

Founding Partner

Rob Saltzberg is a founding partner of Almanac IP Advisors. Rob brings over 25 years of legal experience to a practice that includes:

Offensive and defensive adversarial patent license negotiations
Development of claim charts and infringement/validity arguments
Litigation support
Due diligence for patent acquisitions, IPOs, M&A, and investments
Patent portfolio development and analysis
Enforcement-oriented, product-targeted patent claim drafting
Oversight of outside-counsel patent prosecution and IPRs

Much of Mr. Saltzberg’s career has been devoted to asserting and defending patents. In his previous position as Managing Director at the Ovidian Group IP consultancy, Rob worked with the engineering team to identify infringing products and develop litigation- quality claim charts for digital rights management, mobile telecommunications and flash memory portfolios. Based on those charts, Rob traveled extensively in Asia to negotiate against major technology companies. As a partner at Morrison Foerster, Rob conducted patent analyses and negotiated licenses on behalf of high-profile clients. Some of those licenses involved the well-known Lemelson and Ronald A. Katz patent portfolios.

At Ovidian, Mr. Saltzberg also applied his experience to review hundreds of patents for potential acquisition. His review uncovered many ways in which a surprisingly large number of those patents suffered from inadequate drafting and prosecution, and could have benefitted from best practices that Rob has developed over his decades of experience. Fortunately, in some cases, defects could be remedied through reissue or via claim amendments in continuation applications. Most cases, however, did not meet the conditions necessary to enable those solutions. Rob’s patent asset development practice is devoted to anticipating and avoiding obstacles to patent effectiveness, where possible.

During his 15 years at the global law firm of Morrison Foerster, Mr. Saltzberg engaged in patent analysis and counseling in support of adversarial licensing, litigation and due diligence efforts. He was lead attorney on at least 20 reexamination proceedings, and authored articles and spoke at conferences concerning that powerful tool to challenge patent validity. Rob also oversaw patent prosecution in electrical engineering fields such as telecommunications, GPS, semiconductor testing, computer architecture, electronics, medical devices, mass storage, fiber optics, networking, and signal, image, speech, ultrasound and optical signal processing.

Mr. Saltzberg also served as Chief Patent Counsel at Novera Optics, a startup developer of acousto-optic tunable filters used in optical networks. Before law school, he worked as a systems engineer at TRW, developing adaptive antenna array and signal processing algorithms in support of satellite communications programs. At the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, he wrote simulations of digital image matching and radar range profiling for cruise missile programs.

Mr. Saltzberg received a B.S., summa cum laude, in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland, an M.S.E.E. from Stanford University, and a J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, Law School. While earning his B.S.E.E., Rob received the Outstanding Electrical Engineering Senior Award, and was a member of the College Bowl National Championship Team (general knowledge quiz game). The team went undefeated for 21 consecutive matches.

Mr. Saltzberg has lectured at the UC Berkeley Law School on patent cross-licensing. He has also spoken on IP-related issues at venues including the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, the Intellectual Property Owners Association, the Hispanic National Bar Association, and The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE) Startup Leadership program. Rob has been named by Intellectual Asset Management Magazine to the “IAM 300" – The World’s 300 Leading Intellectual Property Strategists.

Agile IP law firm for strategic Patent matters

Almanac IP Advisors LLP