Courtenay Brinckerhoff is a partner with Foley & Lardner LLP. She is chair of the firm's IP Law and Practice, immediate past vice chair of the firm's Chemical, Biotechnology & Pharmaceutical Practice and a member of the firm's Appellate Practice and Life Sciences Industry Team. She also is involved with Foley's Medical Device Initiative and Nutraceuticals Team. Ms. Brinckerhoff is editor of the Foley blog, PharmaPatentsBlog.com and a regular contributor to @PharmaPatents on Twitter.

Ms. Brinckerhoff's practice focuses on client counseling in all aspects of obtaining, licensing and enforcing patents and conducting freedom-to-operate and due diligence investigations. Over the past 20 years, she has represented clients before the U.S. Patent Office, the U.S. Patent Office Board of Appeals and Interferences, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Ms. Brinckerhoff works with clients in diverse industries, including pharmaceuticals (chemical and biotechnological), human and animal food products, nutraceuticals, and medical devices. She has particular experience with transdermal pharmaceutical products (patches, gels and liquids), oral dosage forms (including controlled release and extended release formulations), enzyme-based technologies, diagnostic and therapeutic antibodies, active and passive immunization therapies, and personalized medicine.

Ms. Brinckerhoff joined Foley as an associate in the fall of 2001, after clerking for the Honorable Judge Schall on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Prior to her clerkship, she worked at Foley as a patent agent and law clerk.

Ms. Brinckerhoff graduated from George Mason University School of Law (J.D., summa cum laude, 1999) as valedictorian of her class. While a law student, she served as a member of the George Mason University Law Review and published an article in the University of Baltimore Intellectual Property Law Journal related to legislation that limits liability for infringement of medical method patents.

Ms. Brinckerhoff graduated from the University of Virginia with a B.S. in chemistry, with distinction, in 1988 and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. In 1988, Ms. Brinckerhoff received an award for outstanding achievement in chemistry from the Virginia Section of the American Chemical Society.

Ms. Brinckerhoff has been following U.S. patent reform since its inception, and she and other Foley colleagues recently co-authored the treatise, America Invents Act: Law & Analysis (Wolters Kluwer 2012). The interface between patent law and FDA law is another area of interest to Ms. Brinckerhoff, who has written and spoken on issues, including patent term extensions, the scope of the Hatch-Waxman "safe harbor," the ANDA litigation framework, and the new follow-on biologics framework.

Ms. Brinckerhoff regularly contributes to the "Genes & Patents" column of Genetic Engineering News, and writes and speaks on topics important to clients in the chemical, biotechnological, pharmaceutical, food, nutraceutical and medical device industries.