Dominic Rota is a registered patent attorney and a member of the Firm's Intellectual Property Group. Dominic counsels clients on the core protection and enforcement of their IP assets through patents, copyrights, and trademarks, while also working with clients to identify other means of protecting their most valuable assets, including through strategic contractual protections and confidentiality programs.
Dominic is a member of the Firm's artificial intelligence (AI) team and the quantum technology team, in which he advises clients on fundamental legal issues underlying these groundbreaking technologies, including licensable use and intellectual-property rights.
Intellectual Property: Protection and Enforcement
As a registered patent attorney, Dominic helps clients secure, manage, and enforce their patent and trademark portfolios. He prosecutes patents and trademarks before the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), from first filing through registration. Throughout that process, he works to align each client's portfolio with its business goals and technology.
His practice goes beyond prosecution to enforcement and defense. He has litigated patent infringement and validity in federal district court and before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board. He has also litigated trademark matters in federal court and before the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board. He resolves and litigates disputes over copyright and trade-dress infringement, so clients can rely on him across the full range of their intellectual property.
This work in high-stakes intellectual property litigation has prepared Dominic to bring claims and to defend against them. His litigation experience also shapes his prosecution work, because he builds portfolios that can hold up when they are enforced or challenged.
Technology Transactions
Dominic helps clients turn their intellectual property and technology into well-protected business assets through carefully structured agreements. He drafts and negotiates trademark, copyright, and patent licenses. He also handles a wide range of technology agreements, including software-development and software-licensing agreements (both on-premises and software-as-a-service (SaaS)), website services and web hosting agreements, application development agreements, and other commercial technology arrangements.
In these deals, he focuses on the provisions that protect a client's interests most directly: ownership and allocation of IP rights, confidentiality, warranties, indemnification, and limitations of liability.
Dominic also advises clients on information security and data-privacy compliance. This includes the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and other federal and state privacy laws. He drafts and negotiates data processing agreements, security requirements, and breach-notification obligations.
In mergers and acquisitions, he helps identify key IP and technology risks during diligence, such as open-source license compliance and chain of title for IP ownership and control.
Emerging Technologies
Dominic advises clients on emerging technologies, including generative AI and quantum-computing technology. He helps clients develop strategy for, and negotiate the use and licensing of, valuable data, with a particular focus on permissible uses of data in generative AI technologies.