Contact: Mark Fefer, Marketing Communications, 206.757.8583 or markfefer@dwt.com
SEPTEMBER 30, 2014 – Roxanne Elings, a partner in the New York office of Davis Wright Tremaine LLP, has been named one of the country’s “20 Most Influential Women in IP” by Law360.
The inaugural list is meant “to honor women who have made significant strides in the male-dominated field of intellectual property law,” according to Law360, a daily news source covering the legal industry. These women, the site says, “are leading the charge in waging high-stakes patent battles, managing billion-dollar portfolios and closing mega IP deals.”
Elings has been a leader for over two decades in developing innovative, successful strategies to help companies protect their trademarks and combat counterfeiters. Representing a long list of top international brands, she has secured landmark rulings that have advanced the ability of brand-owners to stop counterfeiters, including those doing business online from overseas, and to seize their profits.
Elings’ career accomplishments are extensive, and include the following:
- As an associate, she led the successful effort to shut down Lower Manhattan’s most notorious counterfeiting site through an innovative partnership with Mayor Giuliani’s office. The partnership formed the basis of the current Mayor’s Task Force, a consortium that regularly targets landlords renting to counterfeiting businesses.
- Elings helped secure the first-ever ex parte restraint of assets in a counterfeiting case, targeting a major operation selling counterfeit sneakers into Mexico. The restraint was confirmed in the Ninth Circuit in the leading decision, Reebok v. Marnatech.
- In 2003 she prevailed against a ring of New York Chinatown counterfeiters and money launderers in multi-district litigation for multiple watch brands, obtaining a judgment of nearly $600 million, then the highest U.S. judgment in history for a matter of this kind.
- On behalf of The North Face and Polo Ralph Lauren, she won the first-ever standing order to shut down rogue websites and seize counterfeiters’ profits from the sale of counterfeit goods. The strategy she originated in 2010 of targeting website registries has since become standard in anti-counterfeiting litigation.
- Representing the Swiss luxury goods company Richemont (owner of brands such as Cartier and Alfred Dunhill), Elings linked almost 5,000 rogue websites to several Chinese counterfeiting rings, and got them disabled with unprecedented speed while a court order was under seal. Over 1,400 payment-processing accounts were also closed.
- Representing Klipsch, the loudspeaker and headphone company, Elings took on a website based in China that claimed to be a marketplace for buyers and sellers in an effort to hide behind the eBay exemption for liability in the sale of counterfeit goods. She recently obtained a favorable decision concerning the website’s spoliation of evidence and was able to restrain proceeds from sales on the site.
Elings' ongoing leadership in the IP field has been widely recognized. In the 2014 edition of World Trademark Review’s WTR-1000, she was ranked as one of the top attorneys nationally in three areas: prosecution/strategy, anti-counterfeiting, and enforcement. She was the only attorney to appear in top rankings for all three, indicating “an exceptional national reach and reputation,” according to WTR.
Elings received her BFA from Drake University and her J.D. from Pace University. She joined Davis Wright Tremaine in April 2012.
About Davis Wright Tremaine
Davis Wright Tremaine LLP is a national law firm with approximately 500 lawyers representing clients based throughout the United States and around the world. For more information, visit www.dwt.com.