Mary Sylvia

Mary combines over three decades of scientific research and patent law experience to guide biotechnology and pharmaceutical innovators through their most complex IP challenges. Trained as a molecular virologist, she is highly versed in the science underlying molecular genetics and associated technologies, vaccines, biologics and small molecules, as well as plant genetics, breeding and agrochemistry — and is equally knowledgeable in the legal frameworks that determine how those innovations are protected.

Mary’s perspective is shaped by time at the lab bench, service as in‑house counsel, and a formative clerkship with (now Senior) Circuit Judge Raymond C. Clevenger III of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. That experience gives her uncommon fluency in how scientific evidence plays at trial and how appellate courts evaluate it — a dual lens that informs every patent she drafts and every strategy she builds.

A committed educator and mentor, Mary served as the inaugural director of the University of Maryland School of Law’s Intellectual Property Clinic.

• Works with agribusiness corporations in plant technologies and crop protection.
• Counsels seed technologies client in building and maintaining a biotech patent portfolio that ensures the creation and maintenance of a high-value portfolio that protects and enhances business goals.
• Provides patent procurement services, freedom to operate assessments, due diligence analysis, and invalidity and non-infringement opinions.
• Negotiates collaboration, licensing, and settlement agreements.
• Works with pharmaceutical corporations in biologics, small molecule, and device technologies.
• Works with start-up companies on development of IP portfolios, including biologics, small molecules, and software technologies.
• Counseled drug delivery start-up through process of developing IP rights in the area: from first provisional patent to now-developed global portfolio of more than forty patents, negotiated numerous agreements, and ensured that client was provided with freedom to operate and acquired IP rights to sustain long-term security and international success.
• Represented a major university in patent procurement projects involving vaccine technology. Assisted in development of strategy that allowed client to out-license technology to major vaccine developers.
• Assisted in many other patent procurement projects for universities and has negotiated licensing and collaboration agreements to allow technologies developed in universities to be shared with big pharma corporations and other organizations.
• Works with a public nonprofit charity organization to maintain trademark protection for uniquely grown and harvested coffee, and to protect the client’s distinct charity work in restoration and preservation of native plant communities in northern Virginia.

Clerkships

Honorable Raymond C. Clevenger III, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit

Education

American University Washington College of Law, J.D., magna cum laude

University of South Florida, M.S.

University of Wisconsin-Madison, B.S., Dean’s List

Admissions

District of Columbia

Maryland

U.S. Courts of Appeals, Federal Courts

U.S. Patent and Trademark Office

• Federal Circuit Bar Association (FCBA)
• Maryland State Bar Association (MSBA)