Pete A. Smits

LITIGATION + IP COUNSEL

Pete Smits serves as MWR Legal’s Litigation and IP Counsel.  He has over fifteen years experience with Intellectual Property matters, litigating, protecting, and securing trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets and patents for clients.  His electrical engineering background makes him an invaluable asset for IT start-ups that utilize his expertise to protect Intellectual Property rights through the United States Patent Office.  These same companies continue to profit from Mr. Smits’s advice and counsel by legally licensing those valuable rights to business partners.

Mr. Smits has extensive litigation experience in federal and state courts, primarily in IP-related matters, with additional background in general commercial litigation. For the better part of the last decade, Mr. Smits has managed a private practice, counseling Fortune 500 companies such as Bloomberg L.P. and Texas Instruments, Inc., as well as start-up companies, including VizionWare, Inc.  Over the course of that time, he has managed complex litigation in tandem with senior partners and supervised 20-40 junior attorneys throughout the course of a seven-month project.

During his tenure at VizionWare, Inc., Mr. Smits served in a vital and versatile position, capably performing the dual roles of In-House Counsel and Senior Field Applications Engineer, while also supervising many aspects of the company’s marketing department, including website design and content, trade show and client product demonstrations, and technical writing of applications notes and white papers.  Pete’s experience managing multiple facets of burgeoning businesses has given him accurate and realistic insights into the challenges and considerations facing entrepreneurs and start-ups.

Prior to returning to his present home in Austin, Mr. Smits worked for a highly-regarded intellectual property firm in Los Angeles, later purchased in its entirety by Fulbright & Jaworski, LLP.  During his practice time in California, his most exacting litigation was in a five-week jury trial in San Diego, involving a multimillion dollar biotechnology inventor dispute, during which time Mr. Smits supervised, litigated and argued all procedural matters over the course of the trial, while lending his technical expertise to analysis of the biotechnology issues critical to the litigation. 

Pete has the technical background and depth of legal experience necessary to craft expert arguments for review and passage by the Patent and Trademark Office in transactional Intellectual Property matters, and, once such rights are secured, Mr. Smits is an aggressive litigator confident in counseling his clients as to how to best protect their Intellectual Property investments.

Mr. Smits graduated from Michigan State University with a BS in Electrical Engineering.  He then earned an MBA in Engineering Management from the University of Dallas, while working full time as a Product Engineer for Texas Instruments, Inc., and culminated his education with a J.D. from the University of Texas School of Law.