Marc David Peters

Marc David Peters is a partner at Turner Boyd LLP. He represents clients in technology and intellectual property litigation and counseling, primarily involving semiconductor, electronics, and computer-related technologies. He represents technology companies in patent, trade secret, copyright, antitrust, trademark, and commercial disputes in federal court, the U.S. International Trade Commission, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and arbitration. His cases have involved technologies such as gallium-nitride-based LEDs and laser diodes, haptic feedback devices, semiconductor fabrication and devices, microprocessor designs, medical devices, sonar, optoelectronic transceivers, and operating system, virtual machine, and synchronization software.

Before joining Turner Boyd, Marc was a partner at Morrison & Foerster, where he practiced from 2007 to 2020. He has been listed in the Northern California “Super Lawyers” publication every year since 2012 and represented Immersion in Managing IP’s “Milestone Case of the Year” in 2017. Marc currently serves as the President of the San Francisco Bay Area Intellectual Property American Inn of Court.

Marc has represented Immersion Corporation in a variety of intellectual property matters, including in arbitration, federal court, and the International Trade Commission. On behalf of Oracle America, he was second chair on the patent phase of the battle against Google over the Android operating system—a case that the court dubbed the “World Series of IP Cases.”

He defended Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment (China), a Shanghai-based manufacturer of advanced semiconductor fabrication equipment, against accusations by Applied Materials of trade secret misappropriation. Marc obtained a precedential court opinion regarding the rights of California inventors to their inventions, which ruled that Applied Materials’ standard employment agreements were illegal under California law because they purported to require former employees to assign inventions they made after leaving the company. The case settled on confidential terms shortly before trial.

Marc helped obtain summary judgment on behalf of California’s foster parents, in a pro bono case brought with the Children’s Advocacy Institute. California was adjudged to have violated federal law by failing to calculate and pay for the actual costs of raising foster children. As a direct result of the state’s failure to reimburse foster parents as required by federal law, California’s foster care system is less effective and more expensive than it should be. For their work, the Morrison & Foerster team received the 2010 President’s Pro Bono Service Award from the California State Bar, and the case was selected as one of five Outstanding Pro Bono Projects of 2010 by The Daily Journal. The team successfully defended the judgment in an appeal to the Ninth Circuit.

He led the team representing Nichia Corporation in high-stakes patent litigation against Seoul Semiconductor Co. concerning short-wavelength laser diodes and LEDs. In addition to providing effective case and discovery management, Marc developed the technology tutorial and arguments that led to a successful claim construction outcome for our client. The case settled favorably shortly after the claim construction hearing.

Marc is an author of the Patent Case Management Judicial Guide, published by the Federal Judicial Center and LexisNexis. The guide is a comprehensive overview of best practices and procedures in patent cases, and is provided to all federal district judges.

Marc is admitted to practice in California, and is registered to practice before the United States Patent and Trademark Office. He received his J.D. with distinction from Stanford University in 2000, and his Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1997. He was a member of the scientific team that discovered the top quark, and is a co-author of more than a hundred papers in refereed journals. While earning his doctorate, he received the UC Berkeley Faculty Associate Award for excellence in teaching, and authored the “Physics 111: Laboratory Electronics” course manual. Marc received his A.B. in physics, magna cum laude, from Harvard University in 1990.

He is a Life Member of the American Physical Society and President of the San Francisco Bay Area Intellectual Property American Inn of Court.  While earning his J.D., Marc was President of the Stanford Law & Technology Association and an Associate Editor of the Stanford Law Review.