The AI Patent Guy^™

John Ogilvie is a seasoned patent attorney with more than thirty years of experience helping technology innovators secure, enforce, and leverage their intellectual property. He founded Ogilvie Law Firm in 2005, and served for nearly two decades as outside patent counsel to Microsoft.

His practice encompasses patent preparation and prosecution, validity and infringement opinions, patent litigation, ex parte appeals, trademark matters, IP due diligence, licensing, and strategic counsel on artificial intelligence.

John's rare combination of deep technical credentials and extensive legal experience makes him a trusted advisor to sophisticated clients navigating complex IP challenges. Before law school, he spent a decade in software — as a developer, author, and researcher — giving him a practitioner's instinct for the technology behind the inventions he protects.

As the AI Patent Guy^™, John teaches inventors and in-house counsel how to use AI safely — because the wrong chatbot conversation can destroy patent rights before you even know it happened.

Many attorneys who use AI use it to work faster. That's not how John uses it.

For a simpler invention, AI lets him explore the technical space more thoroughly than he could in the same time working without AI — exploring more embodiments, more field-of-use variations, and more edge cases that a manually drafted application might leave on the table. The inventor gets broader, more complete coverage.

For a complex invention, AI helps him run more consistency and vulnerability checks across the specification and the claims — catching the kind of internal contradictions and support gaps that create vulnerability later. The inventor gets a tighter, more defensible application.

The difference isn't that he finishes faster. The difference is what he finds before he finishes.

Education and Credentials

Bar Admissions & Registrations

Utah State Bar (1993) · USPTO Registered Patent Attorney, Reg. No. 37987 (1994) · U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (1998)

Speaking & Publications

Most recently, John presented "Doing Patents Right (and Saving Money)" as a Continuing Legal Education speaker on February 18, 2026, offering in-house counsel practical strategies for cost-effectively obtaining and enforcing patents.

John has also presented guest lectures on intellectual property law to computer science and electrical engineering students at the University of Utah and Utah Valley University.

Selected Publications:
"Defining Computer Program Parts Under Learned Hand's Abstractions Test in Software Copyright Infringement Cases," 91 Mich. L. Rev. 526 (1992) — cited with approval by the Tenth Circuit in Gates Rubber Co. v. Bando Chemical Industries, Ltd., 9 F.3d 823, 835 (10th Cir. 1993)

Advanced C Struct Programming (John Wiley & Sons, 1990, 412 pages)
Modula-2 Programming (McGraw-Hill, 1985, 304 pages)