Mel R. Quintos has been in private practice specializing in U.S. intellectual property law, primarily U.S. patent law, since graduating from law school, and has successfully prosecuted over 5,000 patent applications. Mel has also successfully represented his clients in oral hearings before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (formerly the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences) of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, reexamination proceedings, interferences, and reissue cases. He has advised corporate presidents, corporate intellectual property department heads, other attorneys in the U.S. and abroad, engineers and scientists, university professors, and independent inventors, and has provided them, when requested, with infringement/non-infringement and validity/invalidity opinions in complex cases in various technologies.
After graduating from St. Anthony’s High School in Smithtown, New York, Mel entered the State University of New York (S.U.N.Y.) at Stony Brook where he graduated in 1978 with a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Engineering Science with his core courses directed to electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, and materials science. While in his third year at Stony Brook, Mel was awarded the Best Engineering Class Project entitled The Characteristics of Flawed Aluminum Oxide Plates.
Upon graduation, although offered full scholarships to enter a graduate engineering degree program from many prestigious U.S. universities (including Columbia, Cornell, and Northwestern Universities, and the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), Mel decided instead to accept an engineering position at the Westinghouse Electric Corporation Nuclear Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he was assigned to the Advanced Product Engineering Department. There, he worked with electrical, mechanical, and nuclear engineers in the design and development of next-generation nuclear fuels, and next-generation rod cluster control assemblies (NG-RCCAs) used in safe shutdowns or power level controls of pressurized water reactors (PWRs). He was awarded a number of patent meritorious awards while at Westinghouse.
After three years as an engineer at Westinghouse, Mel decided to enter The Ohio State University College of Law. While in law school, he was President of the Jones Tower Committee, a committee that helps acclimate foreign graduate students to the American culture while studying in the United States. Jones Tower at The Ohio State University campus housed, at that time, about 500 foreign graduate students.
Mel has been in private practice since graduating from law school, and has worked in the Washington, D.C. law firms of Wegner & Bretschneider as associate, and Armstrong, Westerman, Hattori, McLeland & Naughton as partner.
Mel was a contributing author of Essentials of Drafting U.S. Patent Specification and Claims, in its third and fourth printings. The book is sold primarily in Japan. He has also co-authored an article with Mr. Shintaro Hotta on means-plus-function claim language in the Japanese publication of Patents. He is the lead author in the firm’s IP Newsletter, with about 1,000 recipients, dealing with updates on U.S. court cases, laws, rules, and regulations in intellectual property law. Mel has given and continues to give numerous lectures in U.S. intellectual property law in Asia (especially in Japan on a regular basis) and Europe. He has also given seminars on updates in U.S. court cases dealing with intellectual property law at the firm’s liaison office in Tokyo.
Mel’s Bar membership is other than Virginia. Mel is licensed to practice before the District of Columbia Bar and before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. He is admitted to practice before the District of Columbia Court of Appeals, U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.
Mel has been married to his wife, Vicky (a retired oncology RN), for over 30 years, and has two children, Courtney and Mel Francis. Having received a Master’s degree in TESOL at American University, Courtney teaches at a number of nearby colleges, while Mel Francis is a law clerk and technical advisor in our firm.
Mel continues to be an avid tennis player, having played Varsity Tennis at St. Anthony’s, and enjoys competing in 5K races and vegetable gardening.
