Paul Skiermont is a trial lawyer with a national litigation and inter partes review practice. Paul represents companies large and small in litigation involving complex science and technology, including pharmaceuticals and other life sciences, telecommunications, aerospace, natural language processing and consumer electronics. Paul was recently lead trial counsel for the patent owner and exclusive licensee in a patent infringement lawsuit accusing Apple’s Siri personal assistant of infringing a natural language processing patent owned by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Apple settled on the eve of trial for nearly $25 million.

Intellectual Asset Management’s IAM Patent 1000—an industry guide that identifies the top patent practitioners in key jurisdictions around the globe—ranks Paul as one of the Top 12 IP litigation attorneys in Texas, and highlights his “brilliant litigation instinct.”

Skiermont Derby LLP was recognized by the online legal news service Law360 as one of ten national boutique practices “that have established brands on par with the biggest firms” and are “capable of competing with — and beating — the best big firms at the highest level.”

The firm’s IAM profile, based on independent research and interviews with patent attorneys worldwide, notes that the firm is involved in “some of the most challenging technology altercations going, due to its ability to decode elaborate technical concepts, and package – and deliver – arguments in a way that juries find convincing.”

Prior to founding his own firm, Paul was a partner at BartlitBeck LLP, a nationally renowned litigation boutique known for its success in high-stakes cases. Paul earned is undergraduate degree with honors from the University of Kentucky. He earned his law degree from the University of Chicago Law School with High Honors, Order of the Coif, and then clerked for the Honorable C. Arlen Beam, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit.

Skiermont Derby LLP

Skiermont Derby LLP is a firm of trial lawyers who focus on IP litigation and Patent Office IPR proceedings for both patent holders and accused infringers, in addition to antitrust litigation arising from and intersecting with IP issues. We regularly help individual inventors, universities, and businesses large and small assert patent infringement claims, yet we are also one of only a handful of firms RPX Insurance Services selected to serve as “Panel Counsel” to defend against patent infringement cases. The firm prefers to avoid hourly billing and uses a variety of alternative fee agreements to share risk with its clients, including project-based flat fees with bonuses for results and contingent fees.

Our attorneys’ experience in life sciences, engineering, and the humanities enable us to build powerful teams that understand the technology at issue, develop creative arguments, and explain those arguments clearly and persuasively to judges and juries. Our experience spans a vast array of technical fields, including aerospace, pharmaceuticals, telecommunications, computer software, natural language processing, and many others.

In addition to our role as trial lawyers, we understand that our clients need trusted advisors. While our objective is to provide the highest-caliber litigation and trial services, the only way to accomplish that goal is to understand and achieve our clients’ overarching business strategies and objectives. Sometimes a “win” means finding a creative way to avoid a dispute altogether. Other times it means turning a dispute into a new business opportunity, or controlling legal costs.

But for some commercial disputes the only way to “win” is to succeed in court.
Those are the cases we live for, and we built Skiermont Derby LLP to be on the short list of law firms that clients call when they need experienced trial lawyers.