When Engineering Emails Become Plaintiff’s Exhibit A: Patent Willfulness Counseling for Product Companies

Mandy Song, Founding and Managing Partner | Bayes PLLC

Mandy Song is a first-chair patent litigator and the founding and managing partner of Bayes PLLC, where her practice spans legal opinions and counseling, pre-litigation diligence, and patent disputes in U.S. federal district courts, Section 337 investigations at the U.S. International Trade Commission, and PTAB post-grant proceedings. She has spoken on Mega Verdicts in U.S. Patent Litigation: Willful Infringement, Exceptionality & PTAB Challenges at Patent Litigation Masters 2022. An engineer by training, she works directly with inventors to build invention disclosures and counsels clients from startups to conglomerates with a global presence, drawing on nearly 20 years in patent practice.

• Education & Credentials

Mandy holds a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center. Her technical training includes a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering and an M.S. in Biomedical Engineering, both from Duke University, and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Tsinghua University.

She is admitted to practice before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, the U.S. District Courts for the Eastern District of Virginia and the Northern District of Illinois, and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. She is also a member of the District of Columbia Bar and the Virginia State Bar, and her firm profile lists admission to the U.S. Court of Appeals of Veteran Affairs.

• Recognition & Leadership

Mandy has been recognized by American Super Lawyers magazine since 2020 and was twice named among the Top 30 Most Influential Women in IP, in 2019 and 2021. She sits on a committee of the PTAB Bar Association. She and Bayes PLLC completed the Minority Firm Incubator 2.0 hosted by Harrity & Harrity, LLP, a 42-week program for female- and minority-owned firms.

• Professional Involvement

Mandy is a frequent CLE presenter on patent litigation and PTAB proceedings, due diligence for patent matters, industrial standards, and U.S. patent prosecution practice. Her litigation-focused programs include the willful infringement and exceptionality program at Patent Litigation Masters 2022, Venue and Exhaustion: Practical Effects of TC Heartland and Lexmark for a Finnegan webinar, and Extraterritorial Infringement under the U.S. Patent Law for the MySIPO Institute. She was an invited panelist at the 2026 Harvard Law School China Law Symposium, addressing cross-border disputes between China and the United States.

Beyond the courtroom, she taught legal writing as an adjunct professor at George Washington University Law School and has been an invited speaker on patent law at the Duke University Pratt School of Engineering. Her writing has appeared in IPWatchdog, Managing Intellectual Property, and China IP News, and she has presented Strafford webinars on after-final practice before the USPTO.

• Experience

As lead litigation counsel, Mandy handles the full arc of a patent case, from pre-litigation due diligence through fact and expert discovery, depositions, claim construction, summary judgment, hearings, and trial. Representative matters on her firm profile span wearables, semiconductor memory, networked audio, vehicle electronics, and LED lighting, including Ouraring, Inc. v. RingConn LLC, et al. (ITC-337-TA1398, smart rings), Sonos, Inc. v. Linkplay Technology Inc. (D. Del. 1:24-cv-00131, networked smart audio playback), PTAB proceedings in Yangtze Memory Technologies Company, Ltd. v. Micron Technology, Inc., and BMW of North America, LLC v. Stragent, LLC, as well as a series of LED lighting cases involving Koninklijke Philips N.V. in the District of Massachusetts and other federal courts.

Her broader practice covers IP disputes arising on e-commerce platforms such as Amazon and at trade shows, trade secrets, export control, patent licensing and transactions, and global portfolio planning. She manages patent portfolio development for more than 100 clients and has personally drafted, filed, and prosecuted thousands of U.S. patent applications across technologies including artificial intelligence, semiconductors, telecommunications, robotics, and medical devices. Before founding Bayes PLLC, she practiced for more than a decade at Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garret, and Dunner, LLP.

SESSION 1 – Patent Clearance and Infringement Opinions That Actually Defeat Willfulness |12:00pm – 1:00pm

This session examines what it takes to build a patent clearance or infringement opinion that may credibly defeat a willfulness claim under the post-Halo and SRI v. Cisco framework, covering timing considerations, quality benchmarks, the privilege waiver trap, and the Read factor framework courts use to decide whether to enhance damages. Attorneys will learn how opinion of counsel fit into willfulness defenses in light of recent decisions, including Provisur v. Weber, Columbia v. Gen Digital, Wonderland v. Evenflo, and Chief Judge Connolly’s Inari Medical order. Attendees leave with a practical understanding of how to counsel product company clients on clearance protocols, opinion reliance documentation, and the structural decisions that separate defensible good-faith conduct from exposure to treble damages.

BREAK | 1:00pm – 1:10pm

SESSION 2 – Engineer Communication Protocols and Privilege Architecture for Product Companies | 1:10pm – 2:10pm

This session equips IP and product-company counsel with concrete, implementable protocols for managing engineer communications, structuring privilege architecture, and building litigation-hold playbooks that minimize willfulness exposure under the post-Halo standard and recent decisions such as Columbia v. Gen Digital and Wonderland v. Evenflo. Attendees will learn how to route patent encounters through privileged channels, handle notice letters and avoid willful-blindness exposure, and structure clearance review so that privilege is preserved unless and until the company elects to rely on advice of counsel. The session also covers privilege risks from generative AI tools and document-retention policies that cover Slack, Teams, Jira, and GitHub. Attorneys leave with actionable frameworks for engineer training, design-around documentation, and patent triage workflows that protect the company before litigation is ever filed.