Understanding before strategy
The patent's written record gets read completely before any move is chosen. Not skimmed for the claims, not summarized by somebody junior, read: the application, every rejection, every amendment, every argument the applicant made to get the thing allowed.
A strategy built before that reading is a guess wearing a schedule. The evidence for doing it this way is two engineering degrees and a career that began drafting and supervising hundreds of patent applications, which is to say years of being the person writing the record that somebody else would later have to read.
He developed a deep command of the patent history, understood the prosecution record better than the opposition, and identified weaknesses that materially changed the leverage in the case.
Nobody is paid extra for that reading, and it is the sentence where he says the weaknesses were found.
Making complexity understandable
Patent cases are decided by people who did not build the technology. A judge with a docket full of everything else. Twelve jurors who were at work on Monday. A board that has to approve a budget for something it cannot picture. An insurer deciding whether a policy answers.
So explanation is not a courtesy offered at the end of the analysis. It is the analysis, done out loud. If the technology cannot be made clear to the person deciding, nothing else in the case gets a chance to matter.
He has substantial expertise and experience, but also has the ability to reduce the issues into consumable information for executives / board members.
He wrote consumable, which is a chief financial officer's word for something he could actually use in the next meeting.
Details create leverage
A single limitation added to a claim to get around a rejection, twelve years ago, can decide what a patent covers today. A sentence an expert offers now can sit badly against a sentence the inventor wrote then. These are small things and they are usually the whole case.
Finding them is only half of it. The other half is spending them at the point where they change the shape of the dispute, rather than pressing everywhere at once. Pressure applied everywhere is not strategy. It is a bill.
He was also very effective at applying pressure at the right points, without letting the matter spiral into unnecessary cost or complexity.
He came out of that case well and still spent his sentences on what it did not cost him.
Preparing for what matters
Composure in a courtroom is not a temperament. It is a thing that was purchased months earlier, in rooms nobody watched, by having already answered the question that is about to be asked.
The same preparation is spent on other people. A junior associate was given the argument on disputed claim terms at a claim construction hearing, and then given hours of rehearsal and a full mock hearing before he had to stand up and make it.
He meticulously prepared every detail, anticipated opposing counsel's moves with remarkable foresight, and presented our case with compelling clarity and persuasive power that clearly resonated with the judge and jury.
Anticipated is doing quiet work in that sentence. It describes something that happened long before the day he is describing.
Teaching is a litigation skill
Before practicing law: undergraduate business law, graduate mathematics, and an electrical engineering lab, all taught at the University of Missouri. After: Patent Academy, a training program for patent lawyers built at Shook, Hardy & Bacon, and years of continuing legal education taught to other attorneys.
A jury is a classroom that did not volunteer, meeting on a subject it did not choose, with an exam at the end. Anyone who has stood in front of a room that would rather be elsewhere already knows the difference between saying a thing and landing it.
Jesse has a knack for working and studying intentionally and breaking down into bite-size pieces information that would not otherwise be easily digestible.
She is describing what it was like to be taught by him, which is the same thing a juror gets.
Technology amplifies judgment, and never replaces it
ProSolv, a computer services company founded to help pay for college. An analyst's years at Accenture. Executive education at Wharton in the economics of blockchain and digital assets. Artificial intelligence used daily in the work now.
Every one of those is a lever on the same arm. A tool makes a careful reader faster. It does not make an incurious one careful, and it has never once decided what a claim term means.
Jesse's technical abilities are second to none. He consistently demonstrates a command of all aspects of a case and leverages his skills as a patent prosecutor to great effect in litigation.
Command of all aspects is a lawyer's compliment. It means he did not find a corner of the file that somebody else had been left to hold.