Our Practice
We formed McKeon Meunier for you, our clients. Our mission is to provide value without compromise.
McKeon Meunier works with small and large corporations, emerging growth companies, non-profits, universities, research institutions, and their capital and advisory partners, to secure, assert and defend their intellectual property rights. We serve clients with the highest level of IP capability available at any firm, but with the flexibility and value offered by a small firm structure.
McKeon Meunier clients benefit from our high level of technical experience. All of our service providers have some combination of a technical degree (most with advanced technical degrees), industry technical experience and/or academic research experience. Our IP legal experience is also among the highest levels found in the industry. Our professionals have gained deep experience at top law firms, corporations and research institutions. With accuracy and efficiency, we can recognize and solve your IP concerns and help you maximize your opportunities.
We have cast off the accoutrements of big-firm practice and have focused on the essential elements that add value to our relationship: top quality work product, responsive service, state-of-the-art technology and a team of deeply experienced professionals. Though purposefully lean, McKeon Meunier is fully staffed with associate attorneys, patent agents, paralegals and trained IP legal secretaries. By offering expertly tailored services that precisely meet your needs and respect your budget; McKeon Meunier offers value without compromise.
Our Services
Patent Prosecution
Shepherding your ideas through the patent process is a core client service. Clients look to us to perform patentability analyses, draft and file patent applications, and then follow-through with post-issuance protection, including reissue and re-examination proceedings.
Strategic IP Counseling
Clients seeking to take a strategic approach to their IP program will ask us to provide competitive landscape studies to understand their own IP position in the context of their competitive industry, development timelines to understand what technology has passed into the public domain as well as freedom-to-operate studies to proactively ensure a clear path to commercialization.
Portfolio Management
Maximizing the value of existing IP is a goal many of our clients share. We help clients implement technology harvesting programs, advise on product coverage and marking, and help clients minimize ongoing prosecution and maintenance costs.
IP Transactions/Due Diligence
Intellectual Property has become a major organizational asset that can be bought, traded or sold. We advise buyers and sellers throughout the process of technology acquisitions and divestitures, performing due diligence on the scope of protection afforded by IP assets, the freedom to commercialize the technology to be acquired and ownership of the IP in the deal. We also draft the agreements associated with IP transactions, including technology licenses, joint development agreements and many other types of agreements that enable you to acquire new IP or monetize existing IP assets.
Technology Transfer
Our professionals have extensive experience in technology transfer, having worked with institutional clients and their partners around the country and around the world. We understand the unique needs related to institutional inventors and technology commercialization of their inventions.
Opinions
When you’re uncertain about possible infringement or validity issues, we can perform an infringement or validity study and deliver a thorough, well reasoned legal opinion that can inform your future business decisions and guard against enhanced damages. We can also advise you of design alternatives and work-around strategies when the risk of infringement is unacceptable.
Trademarks
We advise clients on mark selection by assessing freedom-to-operate in the U.S. and foreign countries. Once you’ve identified your mark, we protect the mark by prosecuting it through to registration. Also, we help you police your mark by identifying and reporting on conflicting trademark applications and potentially infringing activities.
Pre-Litigation Counseling & Litigation
IP is the lifeblood of many organizations and, at times, needs to be defended. With our thorough understanding of your rights, the competitive landscape, the state of the patent law and the patent office’s rules of practice, we are well equipped to advise you on all measures that can be deployed to protect your IP, up to and including litigation.
Additional Client Services
The professionals at McKeon Meunier are more than technicians providing cookie-cutter solutions that fail to address your business needs. We aspire to be your strategic partner in innovation. To that end, we offer creative combinations of the above-listed IP services and other, less traditional IP services, to our clients, such as guidance on legislative issues affecting your IP and your industry, educational presentations for your team members and launching more sophisticated IP capture and creation programs. If your business goals include IP, we will listen carefully and craft custom solutions that fit your specific needs.