Wendy R. Stein

Wendy R. Stein focuses her practice on intellectual property litigation, litigating disputes involving patents, trade secrets and unfair competition in fields such as software, life science, real estate and insurance.

In the area of reissue patent litigation, Wendy has argued rarely litigated issues under 35 U.S.C. § 251 and 252 -- U.S. statutory provisions relevant to reissue patents -- including the original patent requirement and recapture rule. With respect to patent eligibility litigation, Wendy has both defended patents against 101 eligibility challenges and invalidated patent claims under 35 U.S.C. § 101 in district courts in the Second, Third, and Ninth Circuits. One recent defense win, affirmed by the Federal Circuit in December 2022, involved securing a declaratory judgment that a patent being wrongly asserted against her client was invalid for claiming “an unpatentable abstract idea.”

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In the trade secret area, Wendy has repeatedly secured emergent relief on behalf of trade secret owners to protect their rights under the Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA) or related state laws to prevent imminent and unauthorized dissemination or use of trade secrets. Wendy also maintains an active defense practice representing individual and corporate defendants accused of misappropriating alleged trade secrets in both arbitration and federal and state court proceedings. Recent defense wins include a voluntary dismissal of a case brought by an alleged trade secret owner after Wendy secured key admissions during cross-examination of its main witness at a preliminary injunction hearing and in another matter, a court order dismissing with prejudice an action in which her client was alleged to have misappropriated trade secrets under the DTSA.

Wendy has litigated intellectual property and related commercial disputes in federal and state courts throughout the United States, including New York, New Jersey, Delaware, California, Massachusetts, Florida, Texas, Arizona, the District of Columbia, Illinois, and Nebraska, and before the Court of Appeals for the D.C. and Federal Circuits and TTAB.

Within the greater legal community, Wendy is actively engaged with the intellectual property and federal litigation bars. She is currently President of the Federal Bar Association’s (FBA) Southern District of New York Chapter and previously served as Editor of its publication, The New York Minutes, from 2015-2019. She also served as Editor of the FBA Intellectual Property Law Section’s publication, The IP Legal Browser. In 2019 and 2020, Wendy was an adjunct professor at Fordham University School of Law, where she taught a course on representing foreign entities in U.S. federal court litigation and in the SDNY in particular. In 2022, she guest lectured at Fordham on the Federal Rules of Evidence.