Raymond Van Dyke: Merchant & Gould partner in DC

Raymond Van Dyke is a partner at Merchant & Gould’s Washington, D.C. office and focuses his practice in technology and intellectual property counseling, procurement, licensing, and litigation.

Ray has nearly 20 years experience representing technology companies in the intellectual property area, including strategic counseling, patent and trademark litigation, expert witnessing, and IP licensing portfolio management. He represents domestic and international companies in addition to universities in the biotechnology, pharmaceutical, medical, chemical, software, financial services, telecommunications, Internet, voice over IP (VoIP), and digital industries.

Ray’s extensive technical background in both information-based and life sciences-focused technologies enables him to effectively counsel clients in emerging and converging disciplines, such as bioinformatics, cheminformatics, genomics, pharmacogenomics and personalized medicine, nanotechnology, proteomics, and computational analysis.

He represents clients in federal, state, and international intellectual property litigation, mediation, and dispute resolution in patent, trademark, unfair competition, copyright, antitrust, and trade secret cases. He also enforces and litigates intellectual property rights before the U.S. International Trade Commission and U.S. Customs, prepares clients for hearings before the Federal Trade Commission, and advocates intellectual property and regulatory positions before Senators and Representatives, domestic and foreign trade associations, and ambassadors.

Ray counsels clients in a variety of matters, including infringement, validity, freedom to operate, right to use, reissue, reexamination, appeals, artists’ rights counseling, and other patent and trademark opinion work.

His non-legal work in the software industry and during his graduate studies focused on a variety of cross-disciplinary software applications and techniques, including protein and molecular visualization, animation and modeling, computational optimization, graphics, stimulators, and virtual reality for pharmacological, biophysical, and biochemical research with real-time haptic interface with a robotic force-feedback arm (a nanomanipulator); modeling and analysis of steric forces in protein deformations; designing relational databases for complex proteins from X-ray crystallography data; designing enhancements to UNIX C-Shell; signal and image processing and pattern recognition; 3-D texturing; and SPICE modeling semiconductor chip architecture and performance.

Education

University of North Carolina

• J.D., 1990
• President, American Indian Law Student Association
• M.S., Computer Science, 1989
• B.S., Mathematics, summa cum laude, honors
• Minor in Classical Greek, 1985

Wilbur Wright College, Chicago, IL

• AA, with honors

Bar Admissions

District of Columbia
New York
New Jersey
Texas
Virginia (pending)
U.S. Patent and Trademark Office
U.S. Supreme Court
USCA – Federal Circuit
USCA – 2d Circuit
USCA – 3rd Circuit
USCA – 4th Circuit
USCA – 5th Circuit
Southern District of New York
Eastern District of New York
District of New Jersey
Northern District of Texas
Eastern District of Texas
District of Columbia
U.S. Court of International Trade
U.S. Court of Federal Claims

Professional Affiliations

Ray is active in a variety of legal and technical organizations, and also teaches at two universities. Chair, Greater Washington, D.C. Chapter of the Licensing Executive Society Chair, Emerging Technology Committee, American Intellectual Property Law Association

Speeches and Publications

Ray is a regular speaker to legal, university, and professional audiences on various technology, intellectual property protection, and litigation issues, both nationally and internationally. His recent presentations analyze Supreme Court cases affecting intellectual property rights, proposed changes and reforms to the U.S. patent system, nanotechnology, software patenting, ethics, International Trade Commission litigation and procedures.