Leadership
Michael Davitz, MD, JD
IP Attorney

Michael A. Davitz is a registered U.S. patent attorney as well as a physician with over 15 years of experience in biomedical research, and more than 20 years of experience providing strategic counseling to clients in all aspects of intellectual property law.
Michael has extensive experience negotiating and drafting licensing, technology transfer and research-and-development agreements. He has also conducted intellectual property due diligence for joint ventures, mergers, acquisitions, bankruptcy proceedings and venture capital funding. Michael has prosecuted patents in a wide variety of different technologies, including (i) pharmaceuticals, both generic and innovator, (ii) medical devices such as stents, needles and laboratory instrumentation, (iii) biotechnology, specifically involving monoclonal antibodies and genetically transformed organisms and (iv) information technologies such as linguistic search engines, internet business methods and genomics.
Michael has broad international experience with securing intellectual property protection in Europe, South America, the Middle East, Asia and Canada. He has experience with European patent and trademark oppositions and has also provided patentability, freedom-to-operate, non-infringement and invalidity opinions. He has specific expertise with Hatch-Waxman issues involving the evaluation and development of design-around strategies for generic pharmaceutical products, product portfolio evaluation, Orange Book patent listings, PIV litigation strategies and the negotiation of settlement agreements between innovator and generic companies and between generic companies. Prior to law school, he was an assistant professor of pathology and environmental medicine at New York University School of Medicine, where he was a Lucille P. Markey Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences.
Michael received his J.D. from New York University in 1997, his M.D. from the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University in 1983, and his B.A. from Yale University in 1978. Following law school, he practiced law at the firms of Darby & Darby and White & Case then moved in-house as head of intellectual property for Taro Pharmaceuticals, a multinational pharmaceutical company. Currently, he is a partner for the Ascenda Law Group.