About Patrick
Patrick Richards built a career at the intersection of engineering and law. He graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1993 with a B.S. in civil engineering. He then earned his J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law in 1997. Those credentials framed a professional path that moves between courtroom rules, patent offices and product development teams.
Early in his legal career Richards spent time in private practice. By 2000 he had become a partner at McDermott Will & Emery LLP. That period exposed him to large-firm practice, complex client matters and technology-driven disputes. He left that environment to start his own practice in 2009, founding Richards Patent Law P.C., where he became the managing lawyer.
He has also taken roles outside traditional law firm settings. In 2012 Richards co-founded Resonance Medical LLC and served as its Chief Strategy Officer. The role brought him closer to the product side of medical technology and the commercial pressures that shape intellectual property strategy. In 2014 he returned to the classroom as an adjunct professor at Pritzker Northwestern School of Law, teaching subjects that draw on both technical training and legal practice.
Richards is a registered patent lawyer with the United States Patent and Trademark Office and is licensed to practice in Illinois. His memberships reflect a long-standing engagement with the intellectual property bar. He has belonged to the Chicago Bar Association and the Illinois State Bar Association since 2009, joined the Intellectual Property Law Association of Chicago in 2015, and has been a member of the American Intellectual Property Law Association since 2016. Those affiliations have kept him connected to developments in patent law and to peers who practice in similar technical fields.
The arc of Richards’s career traces a steady move from engineering into patent work and then into roles that bridge law, business and teaching. He runs Richards Patent Law P.C., where he handles patent prosecution, counseling and related IP matters for clients in technology and medical device areas. He focuses his current practice on securing and managing patent rights for inventors and companies.
