Jürgen Vollrath has spent more than three decades helping technology companies turn engineering into defensible, valuable intellectual property, for Fortune 100 enterprises and first-time founders alike. At ClaimMark he is the legal conscience of the product: every workflow, claim-development step, and quality check must meet the standard he would expect of an experienced software-patent prosecutor before it reaches a customer. He is also a partner at Bocchieri & Lachuk Intellectual Law Group.
Engineer first
Jürgen trained as an engineer before he trained as a lawyer, earning his degree in electronic engineering and then his LL.B. at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. He served as a JAG officer in the South African Air Force, rising to First Lieutenant. He is admitted to the State Bar of California and the South African Bar, and has been registered to practice before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office since 2001.
Chief IP Officer at SAP
Jürgen joined SAP, the world's largest enterprise-software company, as Senior Patent Counsel and went on to serve as its acting Chief IP Officer and then Chief Patent Counsel for SAP Research. He led a 20-person worldwide intellectual-property department, grew SAP's annual patent filings from 260 to 430 while cutting the budget in half, roughly quadrupling the return on the patent program, and negotiated SAP's global patent cross-license with Microsoft, one of the defining IP agreements in enterprise software.
Before SAP, Jürgen was senior IP counsel at National Semiconductor, where he led licensing, trademarks, and IP due diligence for acquisitions. He then joined Arter & Hadden as a partner and built the firm's San Francisco patent practice.
Founder and inventor
Jürgen has built companies as well as portfolios. He was general counsel and chief IP officer of MSE, an energy-technology company developing high-efficiency power transformers, and then co-founded Corinthian Ophthalmic as its general counsel. Starting from no patent applications at all, he co-developed the two dozen base patents underlying its ophthalmic drug-delivery portfolio; Corinthian was acquired by Eyenovia (Nasdaq: EYEN).
He is a named inventor on eight granted U.S. patents spanning ophthalmic drug delivery, power transformers, irrigation, and digital-health monitoring, including two patents co-invented with Ken Greenwood. Jürgen and Ken have also filed a patent application covering ClaimMark-P's approach to automating patent drafting.
Counsel to innovators
Since 2014 Jürgen has worked with entrepreneurs, start-ups, and research institutions through the Inventor Assistance Foundation and Exponential Technology Counsel. He has served as outside IP counsel to emerging technology companies, and gives back to Portland's entrepreneurial community by supporting the technology incubators OTRADI and OBI. His practice spans patent strategy and prosecution, litigation, licensing, trademarks, and trade secrets across software, semiconductors, communications, medical devices, defense, and renewable energy.
Why ClaimMark
Jürgen has seen patent drafting from every seat: engineer, inventor, prosecutor, licensing negotiator, and the chief IP officer who has to justify the budget. He knows a strong software patent comes from disciplined reasoning, faithful disclosure, and claims that hold up years later, not from more text. At ClaimMark he leads attorney validation of the platform and works directly with the practitioners in the Founding Counsel Program, so that the attorney stays in control of every legal judgment.
Jürgen Vollrath is a co-founder of ClaimMark Inc. His practice at Bocchieri & Lachuk is separate from ClaimMark. The firm does not endorse ClaimMark-P, and neither Jürgen nor the firm provides legal services through ClaimMark. This page describes his background and is not an offer of legal representation.