Meredith Martin Addy

Meredith “Mimi” Martin Addy helps companies develop patent strategies designed to create durable, commercially valuable intellectual-property rights. A registered patent attorney, electrical engineer, and nationally recognized Federal Circuit advocate, Mimi advises clients on patent portfolio strategy, prosecution risk, post-grant proceedings, licensing, enforcement, and monetization. 

Mimi brings a perspective to patent strategy developed through more than thirty years of testing patents in district courts, at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, and before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. She has handled more than 100 patent cases in federal district courts and more than 100 Federal Circuit appeals. That experience gives her exceptional insight into how choices made during application drafting and prosecution can later affect patent eligibility, written-description support, claim construction, validity, infringement, and enforceability. 

Working with in-house counsel, inventors, and prosecution teams, Mimi helps identify issues that may affect the long-term strength and usefulness of a patent portfolio. She counsels clients on claim and disclosure strategy, prosecution-record development, portfolio evaluation, and the relationship between pending applications and related litigation or post-grant proceedings. Her objective is to ensure that prosecution strategy accounts for how the resulting patents may ultimately be licensed, asserted, defended, or challenged. 

Mimi has worked across a broad range of technologies, including software and system architecture, digital wallets, databases, encryption, wireless communications, semiconductors, electrical circuitry, medical devices, biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, industrial systems, automotive manufacturing, and guided vehicles. Her electrical-engineering training allows her to understand technically complex inventions, while her M.B.A. experience helps her evaluate patent decisions in the context of commercial goals, investment, competition, and litigation risk. 

Federal courts have appointed Mimi to serve as a special master and court-appointed expert in technically sophisticated patent cases. She has also been retained as a patent-law expert on prosecution standards of care, claim construction, validity, enforceability, and patent-litigation procedure. These roles reflect her ability to evaluate patent rights objectively and explain complex technical and legal issues with precision. 

Mimi earned her B.S. in Electrical Engineering and B.A. in Fine Arts from Rice University, her J.D., with honors, from the University of Georgia, her LL.M. in Intellectual Property Law, with honors, from the University of Illinois Chicago, and her M.B.A. from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. She is registered to practice before the USPTO and admitted before the Federal Circuit and the U.S. Supreme Court.