James V. Suggs is a partner with McDonnell Boehnen Hulbert & Berghoff LLP. Mr. Suggs concentrates in patent law, handling both procurement and litigation matters. He prepares and prosecutes patent applications, prepares opinions of counsel, and performs validity, infringement, and patentability analyses in a wide variety of pharmaceutical, chemical, materials science, integrated and fiber optic, and related technologies. His litigation experience includes federal district court and appellate practice as well as advocacy in forums such as the International Trade Commission, and spans a diverse range of technologies, including pharmaceuticals, medical devices, circuit boards and optically-based chemical sensors.
Mr. Suggs was a patent agent in the intellectual property department at Corning Incorporated, where he prepared and prosecuted patent applications in polymer and organic chemistry, glass, ceramics, photonics, and optical fiber technologies. Before turning to patent law, he was a scientist in the Science and Technology division at Corning Incorporated and at the Georgia Tech Research Institute, where he developed materials, sensing chemistries and device architectures for polymer- and liquid crystal-based integrated optic devices for telecommunications and chemical sensing applications. He is listed as an inventor on five issued U.S. patents. In graduate school, Mr. Suggs focused on synthetic organic chemistry, where his graduate research focused on the synthesis of the bicyclic ketal core of the zaragozic acids. His undergraduate research related to the synthesis of trypanothione reductase inhibitors; and to mechanistic studies of the Claisen rearrangement.