Roman Melnik

Professor Melnik is of counsel to Lowenstein & Weatherwax LLP, and teaches patent law as a Lecturer in Law at USC Law School. Prior to teaching at USC, Professor Melnik was a partner with Irell & Manella LLP, one of the foremost patent litigation firms in the United States. Professor Melnik has extensive experience in patent litigation matters in a wide array of technologies, including PVD, CVD, and wet techniques and tools for semiconductor substrate processing, the mathematics of magnetron design, pharmaceutical active ingredients and dosage forms, energy-recovery circuit design for storage media and plasma displays, construction of ultrasound medical devices, polymer chemistry, JPEG compression, traffic-control devices, and molecular biology.

Additionally, Professor Melnik has experience providing opinions of counsel and right to use analyses, and serving as an expert witness, activities that he performs as a solo patent law practitioner separate from his affiliation with L&W LLP.

Professor Melnik graduated magna cum laude with an A.B. in Chemistry from Harvard University and received an M.S. in Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley. He taught chemistry at Berkeley and Harvard and worked as a research chemist before earning a J.D. from Columbia Law School, where he was a senior editor of the Columbia Law Review and taught civil procedure. He then clerked for the Honorable Phyllis A. Kravitch, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.

Kimble v. Marvel Entertainment, LLC, 135 S.Ct. 2401 ( 2015) – Obtained a grant of certiorari over the opposition of the United States as amicus curiae and briefed and argued case as lead counsel for petitioners before the United States Supreme Court. Case dealt with the propriety of patent royalties for post-expiration use in light of patent and antitrust law policies and whether the Court should overrule its prior decision in Brulotte v. Thys Co., 379 U.S. 29 (1964) prohibiting such royalties per se.

Medtronic, Inc. v. Mirowski Family Ventures, LLC, 571 U.S. 191 (2014) – Represented amicus curiae Tessera Technologies, Inc. as lead counsel before the United States Supreme Court in arguing for vacatur and remand of the Federal Circuit’s decision on the ground that the district court lacked federal question subject matter jurisdiction to adjudicate the underlying patent licensing dispute and the Court of Appeals therefore lacked appellate jurisdiction. Supreme Court took the rare step of addressing Tessera’s amicus argument in its opinion on the merits.

Novartis AG vs. Silom Medical Co., Ltd. — Testified as an expert patent law witness for the accused infringer generic company in pharmaceutical patent litigation in Thailand involving the anti-hypertensive medication valsartan. The trial court issued a noninfringement opinion after a bench trial based on the expert testimony proffered by the defense. The Thai Supreme Court affirmed on the alternative ground that the patent was invalid over the prior art, again on the basis of the expert testimony proffered by the defense.