Law360, Bloomberg Law, Patent Lawyer Magazine, Global Legal Chronicle and Richmond BizSense were among the media outlets that covered the arrival of partner Amanda Wieker, a former Administrative Patent Judge at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) of the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. Wieker joined the firm’s intellectual property practice group in Richmond, Virginia.
Wieker served for nearly 10 years at the PTAB, most recently as Acting Vice Chief Administrative Patent Judge. Wieker told Law360 she moved to McGuireWoods because the firm offered her a strong platform to develop a practice focused on PTAB work.
“I had achieved everything I wanted to achieve at the Board, and I was ready for some new challenges,” she said in Law360’s Sept. 25, 2024, story. “I’m really looking forward to helping McGuireWoods build out a robust PTAB practice and really provide some insights to the firm’s clients in that regard.”
Wieker told Law360 she found her way to patent law unexpectedly while pursuing an engineering degree and realizing she did not want to become a practicing engineer.
“I was lucky enough to have a professor who thought I was a skilled writer, and he encouraged me to consider patent work, which he thought would be a good mix between my writing interest and ability and the engineering work I had been doing,” Wieker said. “So I joined the patent office as a patent examiner out of undergrad, and that really solidified for me that the patent world was exactly what I was meant to work in.”
Reuters also covered Wieker’s arrival in its Sept. 25 Afternoon Docket email newsletter.