John Dragseth, 39

Who gets a thrill out of listening to audiotapes of patent case oral arguments before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit? Or out of writing abstracts of virtually every Federal Circuit patent decision since 1998? Or from poring over a technical book on Google’s search engine?

“I’m completely geeked out,” admits John Dragseth, a Minnesota native and principal in his firm’s Minneapolis office, where he lives and breathes patent appeals, along with prosecution and opinion work. Dragseth’s high-profile Federal Circuit victories in the past several years include the 2006 Federal Circuit win for client LG Electronics, Inc., in a much-watched computer system patent licensing dispute with Quanta Computer, Inc. The Federal Circuit completely reversed a lower court finding that LG Electronics was not entitled to additional royalties. (Dragseth is not involved in the resulting U.S. Supreme Court case.) In 2001 Dragseth client Mentor H/S Inc. went from being, in his words, “totally wiped out to collecting all the money” when he achieved reinstatement of a $6 million jury award over an ultrasound liposuction process. Likewise, in 2003 Dragseth helped 3M Company, in a case against Avery Dennison Corp., to overcome a summary judgment of noninfringement at the district court. The case then settled.