One. Understanding before strategy.
Read it all first
No move is made in a patent case until the written record behind the patent has been read completely. Not summarized, not skimmed for the useful part, and not handed to someone junior with instructions to flag anything important. Strategy chosen before that reading is a guess wearing a suit.
What makes the reading possible is the background under it: a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and a second in computer engineering, then a legal career begun on the drafting side, where he wrote or supervised hundreds of patent applications. The arguments in a prosecution file were once his own arguments, in his own filings, which is a different kind of familiarity than reading them cold.
He developed a deep command of the patent history, understood the prosecution record better than the opposition, and identified weaknesses that materially changed the leverage in the case.
Jake McCampbell, Co-Founder and CEO, StringKing, June 2026
Two. Complexity is the lawyer's problem, not the reader's.
Say it so it can be used
Patent cases are decided by people who did not build the technology. A judge, twelve jurors, a board of directors approving a budget, an insurer deciding whether a policy responds. None of them will take a course in your field first, and none of them owe you the effort of following an explanation that was not built for them.
So the test of an explanation is not whether it is accurate. It is whether the person receiving it can now do something with it: approve a spend, choose between two paths, or answer their own board's question without calling anyone.
He has substantial expertise and experience, but also has the ability to reduce the issues into consumable information for executives / board members.
Matthew Hardy, CFO of Bonterra, and CFO of TeleSign at the time of the matter, September 2021
Three. Details create leverage.
Pressure at one point, not everywhere
Leverage in a patent case is rarely dramatic. It is a limitation the applicant added in 2011 to get around a rejection, which now sits between the patent and the accused product. It is a sentence in an expert report that cannot be squared with what the inventor said under oath about the same figure. It is a date on a document that arrived in the fourteenth box.
Finding one of those is worth more than pressing every issue at once, and it costs less. A case fought evenly across every available front is the most expensive way to reach the same result.
He was also very effective at applying pressure at the right points, without letting the matter spiral into unnecessary cost or complexity.
Jake McCampbell, Co-Founder and CEO, StringKing, June 2026
Four. Composure is prepared, not summoned.
Months before the room
What looks like calm in a courtroom is almost always a decision made months earlier and rehearsed since. The exhibit was chosen in the spring. The answer to the hard cross-examination question was written down, argued about, and rewritten. The thing that will go wrong was already imagined.
The same applies to your own witnesses, who are usually engineers and founders being deposed for the first time in their lives, and who deserve to know what is about to happen to them before it happens.
He meticulously prepared every detail, anticipated opposing counsel's moves with remarkable foresight, and presented our case with compelling clarity and persuasive power that clearly resonated with the judge and jury.
Ryan Reed-Baum, CSCA, Chief Executive Officer, TruLog, April 2026
Five. Teaching is a litigation skill.
A jury is a classroom that did not volunteer
A trial lawyer in a patent case spends most of the day teaching a subject to people who did not choose it, cannot ask questions, and will decide the matter anyway. That is a teaching problem before it is a legal one.
He taught undergraduate business law, graduate mathematics and an engineering laboratory at the University of Missouri before practicing law, built Patent Academy, a training program for patent lawyers, at Shook, Hardy & Bacon, and has taught continuing legal education for years. Breaking a subject into the order it has to be learned in is a practiced skill, and it is visible from the first meeting.
Jesse has a knack for working and studying intentionally and breaking down into bite-size pieces information that would not otherwise be easily digestible.
Lischen Peso Gibson, Senior Corporate Counsel, Privacy and Data Security, Oracle, June 2022
Six. Technology amplifies judgment and never replaces it.
A tool, held at the right distance
He founded ProSolv, a computer-services company, to help pay for college, worked as an analyst at Accenture, took Wharton executive education in the economics of blockchain and digital assets in 2022, and uses artificial intelligence daily in the practice.
Used well, those tools shorten the distance to the document that matters and keep a small team competitive against a much larger one. What they do not do is decide anything. A machine can rank ten thousand documents by relevance. It cannot tell you which sentence in the seventh one will change the case.
Jesse's technical abilities are second to none. He consistently demonstrates a command of all aspects of a case and leverages his skills as a patent prosecutor to great effect in litigation.
Andrew Cooper, General Counsel and Board Director, formerly of Meta, October 2021
If you have been accused
Where the six land for the accused
- The narrowing that got their patent granted may already put your product outside it. That is found by reading, not by arguing.
- Your board is going to ask what this costs and whether it can end the company. Both answers should arrive before the question does.
- One good limitation is worth more than four adequate defenses, and it is cheaper to run.
- Your engineers will be deposed. They should know that months in advance, not the week before.
- If the technology cannot be explained to you in plain language, it will not be explained to a jury in plain language either.
- Document review is where a defense budget quietly disappears. Tools help. Deciding what not to look at helps more.
If someone is using what you built
Where the six land for the owner
- Everything your attorneys argued to the patent office to get the patent allowed will be read back to you. Better to read it first.
- Your investors and your board need the position stated in terms of risk and time, not in terms of claim limitations.
- The strongest point in an enforcement case is usually one claim against one product, not every claim against everything they sell.
- Your inventors will be asked what they meant, years later, about drawings they barely remember. That preparation starts early.
- The story of how the invention came about has to be understandable to someone who has never seen the field.
- Enforcing puts the patent in play. The judgment about whether to accept that risk is yours, and it should be made with the record in front of you.