BOSTON, January 5, 2012—Duane Morris LLP has appointed Michael R. Gottfried managing partner of its Boston office. Gottfried succeeded partner Martin Shulkin, who served in that role for 12 years, as of January 1, 2012. With more than 30 attorneys, the firm's Boston office serves domestic and international clients in a wide range of legal matters.
"Together with Marty Shulkin, Mike was one of nine lawyers who established our Boston office in 1999, and he has played a substantial part in shaping its strategic direction since then," said Duane Morris Chairman John Soroko. "Mike is one of the key firmwide litigation partners within Duane Morris, in both the intellectual property and commercial litigation arenas. I know he will build on the success Marty Shulkin engineered."
"This office has seen impressive prosperity in the past decade, both in terms of growth and in the range of legal matters we handle," said Gottfried. "Moving forward, we hope to continue and even accelerate those achievements. I am honored and excited to take on this new responsibility, and look forward to working with our local attorneys and the firm's leadership to further the interests of our clients in Boston and around the world."
Gottfried practices in the areas of intellectual property and commercial litigation. He represents clients in contract and business tort disputes; unfair and deceptive trade practice cases; and patent trademark and copyright infringement matters. Gottfried has litigated more than 25 cases involving noncompetition agreements and theft of trade secrets, many of which were successfully resolved in their earliest stages after preliminary injunction hearings.
During the past several years, Gottfried has led Duane Morris trial teams to significant court verdicts at the federal and state levels, addressing numerous diverse legal issues. In a widely followed case, he represented biotechnology giant Amgen Inc. at trial against rival F. Hoffmann-La Roche in its patent infringement battle over the anemia drug Epogen. Amgen obtained a permanent injunction, and the injunction was upheld on appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. In 2010, as lead trial counsel, Gottfried obtained an order on behalf of Multimodal Technologies from the Delaware bankruptcy court sustaining the client's objection to the assignment and assumption of its intellectual property license to Nuance Communications.
In addition, Gottfried represented Brooks-Cole, a college textbook publisher, in successfully obtaining a ruling that its use of a written psychological test borrowed from another publication was a "fair use" in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. He also led a team that represented Louis Guyott, the seller of a $100 million business, against a $20 million indemnification claim brought by the buyer, Bardon Trimount, for the cleanup of a Massachusetts Superfund site. At the case's conclusion, Gottfried obtained a defense verdict and an award of $3.9 million in fees and costs after a 10-day trial in Massachusetts Business Court. Finally, he represented a minority shareholder in a closely held corporation through trial and appeal in a breach of fiduciary duty/excessive compensation claim, obtaining a seven-figure judgment.
Gottfried is a 1983 graduate, with honors, of the George Washington University National Law Center and a magna cum laude graduate of Tufts University. In 2009, 2010 and 2011, Chambers USA: America’s Leading Lawyers for Business included Gottfried in its listing of leading IP lawyers in Massachusetts. He has recognized as a "Massachusetts Super Lawyer" in the field of commercial litigation in Boston magazine from 2004 to 2011, and was listed in Super Lawyers Corporate Counsel Edition for business litigation in 2009 and 2010. Gottfried is designated AV® Preeminent™ Peer Review Rated by Martindale-Hubbell. He has also advised a local high school mock trial team and serves as a judge in collegiate mock trial tournaments.
About the Duane Morris Boston Office
Duane Morris' Boston office, which recently relocated to 100 High Street, offers a diversified practice to the wide range of entities comprising New England’s economy, from long-established businesses to those in newly emerging industries. The firm's Boston lawyers practice in the areas of business litigation and alternative dispute resolution, mergers and acquisitions, venture capital transactions, securities law, banking and financial services, intellectual property, bankruptcy and reorganization, real estate, healthcare law, employment and tax matters.
About Duane Morris
Duane Morris LLP, a full-service law firm with more than 700 attorneys in offices across the United States and around the world, offers innovative solutions to the legal and business challenges presented by today's evolving global markets.