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Picture a home-based inventor in a garage, or a team of engineers in a cramped small business conference room. The ideas they’ve brought to life after months of research and hours of computer code crunching were finally deemed good enough to warrant a patent from the U.S. government. That patent is a potential billion-dollar business just waiting to be born – or a billion-dollar temptation for intellectual property thieves.

The Fort Worth intellectual property and patent infringement specialists at Friedman, Suder & Cooke serve as a firewall of sorts for individuals and small companies that need help turning the potential in a patent into business reality. And they may also need the firm to go to bat for them if they believe someone else – say, a larger corporation – has stolen their idea.

“We’re a business, and we’re there to operate a business and be successful,” says firm shareholder Jon Suder. “But there’s a noble cause to representing inventors and enforcing patents that the government has determined are worthy of protection – something that an inventor may not fully appreciate what he has or what he can do with it.”

Shareholder Mike Cooke adds more detail in describing his firm’s intellectual property litigation strategies. “We represent people who own the patent, the inventors of the patents,” Cooke said. “It’s a situation where it’s economically not feasible for this individual to be able to enforce his property right, this patent that he holds, against other companies. He doesn’t have the assets to try to monetize it, to try and make a business of it, much less incur years of litigation trying to enforce that and try to have other people respect his rights. So what we do is jump in the same boat with the inventor.”

And the Fort Worth law firm’s way of sharing risk and reward with its clients is truly a sink-or-swim scenario: the firm is one of the few intellectual property litigation offices that operates on a contingency basis. But that ensures that individuals or smaller entities can hire experienced lawyers to take on a big corporation’s deep pockets and teams of lawyers in the hope that justice can be served.

“And that’s one of the most rewarding things about this, is to get to know these people who are very creative, who are innovators in our society, work with them and help them realize the value, the benefits of their dream or their idea, their invention,” Cooke said.

That passion for justice has resulted in some high-profile patent infringement litigation victories for Friedman, Suder & Cooke that have drawn the attention of publications like the Wall Street Journal, the National Law Journal and Texas Lawyer. Suder was chosen by Texas Monthly Magazine in 2003 as a “Super Texas Lawyer,” and both he and Cooke have spoken at legal seminars.

Suder’s specialty is working up analogies and examples that can help a jury understand arcane technology aspects of a case. The Fort Worth lawyer takes to his whiteboard in strategy sessions with team members to come up with concise ways of explaining grievances. Yet engaging in intellectual property litigation battles and taking on would-be IP thieves is just one service provided by the firm; it also helps clients monetize patent portfolios and develops strategies to maximize IP. It’s the business side of intellectual property rights that can be lost amid the headlines surrounding high-profile technology company lawsuits.

“There are legal rules, there are business rules, that inventors – most of them are engineers or someone who just came up with something, and they don’t appreciate how you read a patent, what happened, whether it reads on someone’s product or system or method, and what you can do,” Suder said. “Because your patent is good for 20 years from the time you filed it, so what you thought five years ago, someone else may go, ‘Hey, did you know this applies to that,’ and the inventor may say, ‘I never thought of that.’ But that’s what a patent gives you – the right to exclude people from practicing an invention unless you say so; the respect that the government says, ‘If we issue you a patent, your invention is entitled to a level of respect.’”

That respect began with the founding fathers. Both Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin were prolific inventors, and they saw the value in making sure that intellectual property rights were protected in the Constitution. “They recognized that the patent system was important to get our country up and running as a great industrialized nation. Innovators needed business partners to take it (an idea) and show it and teach people how to do it, so that they can then move the ball forward and say, ‘Alright, I can’t do that, but let me see if I did it this way.’ And then that’s what made us a great country.”

For more information on intellectual property litigation, go to www.fsclaw.com.