Alex Yap

Alex Yap co-chairs Morrison & Foerster LLP's Post-Grant Strategy + Disputes practice and is a member of the firm's IP Litigation practice. A former administrative patent judge at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, he focuses on America Invents Act trials before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board as well as intellectual property litigation. As an administrative patent judge based in San Jose, California, he presided over more than 200 ex parte appeals, inter partes reviews, and covered business method patent proceedings.

Before his judicial service, Yap spent 11 years at Morrison & Foerster advising technology clients on patent litigation, during which, according to the firm, he was involved in more than 30 USPTO reexamination and review proceedings and obtained cancellations of asserted claims in numerous cases. Prior to becoming a lawyer, he worked for more than four years as a circuit design engineer at Freescale (formerly Motorola) and Analog Devices, designing embedded flash memories and ADSL chipsets. He has published technical articles in trade journals and is a named inventor on multiple U.S. patents.

Yap received his B.S. and M.S. in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1993 and 1998, and his J.D., magna cum laude, from the University of Minnesota Law School in 2005, where he was an editor of the Minnesota Law Review and elected to the Order of the Coif. He is a member of the California State Bar and is registered to practice before the USPTO.

Recognition

• Ranked for Intellectual Property: Patent Trial and Appeal Board — Chambers USA ^[2]
• Recommended for Patent Litigation — The Legal 500 US (2023) ^[2]
• PTAB Practitioner of the Year — Managing IP (2025) ^[2]