Roy S. Gordet

  Intellectual Property Law

  415.905.0200

  rgordet@mbvz.com

Biographical & Professional Background

Roy's academic background is in English and foreign literature and languages, having earned a Bachelor of Arts with Honors in English Language and Literature from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.  Roy also earned a Masters in Communications Sciences from Hunter College of the City University of New York. These academic studies formed an excellent background to his legal education that emphasized intellectual property at the Santa Clara University School of Law, a Jesuit institution founded in 1851 in Santa Clara, California. He also studied one summer during law school at the University of Strasbourg, France and had an internship with the Madrid office of an international law firm based in Washington, D.C.  During law school, he was elected to the Honors Moot Board and to the Santa Clara Law Review.  Following graduation, Roy was a Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Patent, Copyright and Competition Law in Munich, Germany. At the Max Planck Institute, he did advanced research in copyright law and participated in workshops and discussion groups with intellectual property lawyers and scholars from many countries, and developed personal and professional relationships that continue to this day.  During his fellowship he became conversant in German. Roy is fluent in Spanish and French, and worked part-time as a certified Spanish-English courtroom interpreter for the Santa Clara County courts during law school. Roy has the ability to read and to a lesser extent converse in Italian and Portuguese.

Following the fellowship at the Max Planck Institute, Roy returned to California and worked for an intellectual property law boutique as well as five years in the litigation and intellectual property department of Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati, one of California’s largest full-service law firms, considered a premier law firm in the corporate, technology, intellectual property, and venture capital fields. During most of 1993, Roy was a Commercial Law Liaison for the Central and East European Law Initiative (CEELI) in Krakow, Poland.  CEELI, a program of the American Bar Association, sends US lawyers and judges to Central and Eastern Europe, as well as to the former Soviet Republics, to introduce lawyers and judges in these countries to US legal principles and the rule of law.  Roy worked closely with scholars from the Intellectual Property Law Institute of Jagiellonian University, as well as with local attorneys and business persons in Krakow, Poznan, and Warsaw. 

In 1994, Roy established his solo practice in San Francisco, which specialized in litigation and counseling in the fields of artists’ rights, trademarks, copyrights, rights of privacy and advertising law.  In 2007, that practice was merged with McQuaid Bedford & Van Zandt, LLP, (www.mbvz.com) a well-established San Francisco business and litigation firm.  Roy has worked with many diverse clients to safeguard or enforce their intellectual property rights, and has successfully prosecuted hundreds of trademarks through to registration.  Roy also works hand in hand with many San Francisco Bay Area business and litigation lawyers, as well as with trademark lawyers throughout the US and from many different countries.  Roy has taken on pro bono work on behalf of journalists or artists needing representation.

Academic Legal Teaching Experience

- Adjunct instructor for seven years (until 2003) in the Paralegal Certification Program of the Extended Learning Center, Downtown Campus, San Francisco State University, where he taught a full-semester course on intellectual property law.  (The paralegal certification program at San Francisco State is accredited by the American Bar Association.)

- Developed a program in cooperation with NRI, a certified continuing education provider now based in Concord, California, entitled “Unfair Competition, Trademarks & Copyrights: Intellectual Property Law for the General Practitioner”. (These accredited full-day CLE programs, with Roy as the sole presenter, were presented in six different venues in California in 1995 and 1996.)

- Adjunct lecturer for the Spring Semester of 1988 in the Department of Communications, College of Notre Dame de Neamur in Belmont, California; taught an undergraduate course entitled "Media and the Law".

Professional Awards and Achievements 

- Member, Oppositions and Cancellations Standards and Procedures Subcommittee of the Trademark Enforcement Committee, International Trademark Association, 2007-present