Barry K. Shelton is a partner in the law firm’s Intellectual Property practice and serves as head of the Intellectual Property group for the Austin office. He is a trial and appellate lawyer with more than a dozen patent trials before the U.S. International Trade Commission and district courts across the country, and has argued several appeals before the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Mr. Shelton is lead counsel in cases across all disciplines of electrical engineering, focusing on processor and computer architecture, software, networks and communication protocols, and semiconductors. In addition, he is a registered patent attorney, and has prosecuted patents, performed due-diligence analysis of patent portfolios, and authored pre-litigation and freedom to operate opinions.

Prior to joining Pillsbury, Mr. Shelton was a partner and co-chair of IP Litigation at another major law firm. In addition to seventeen years as a lawyer, he has several decades of experience as an electrical engineer, inventor, and software developer. Other legal and engineering experience includes working with Wireless Knowledge, a joint venture of Microsoft and QUALCOMM, as vice president, corporate counsel; vice president, operations and intellectual property counsel. He was also president and founder of Performance Consulting Group, LLC, a technical instructor at Vortex Data Systems and an electronics engineer for the U.S. Navy at the Naval Aviation Depot in San Diego, California.