John Desmarais is the founding partner of Desmarais LLP. After practicing in the area of intellectual property litigation and counseling for several years at Fish & Neave, in 1992, he left private practice to serve as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of New York, where for three years he tried criminal jury trials for the federal government. After leaving the government, Mr. Desmarais returned to Fish & Neave and to the practice of intellectual property litigation. In 1997, he joined the New York office of Kirkland & Ellis as a partner, and later became head of the firmwide Intellectual Property Litigation Practice. From 2004-2009, he also served as a member of Kirkland’s Firm Management Committee. After 13 years at Kirkland, in 2010 Mr. Desmarais left to found Desmarais LLP, an Intellectual Property trial boutique that specializes in jury trials for plaintiffs and defendants and focuses on alternative fee structures.

On the plaintiff’s side, Mr. Desmarais’s recent $82.5 Million win for IBM against Groupon on four patents the jury found to be willfully infringed was widely covered in the press and resulted in his selection by The American Lawyer as “Litigator of the Week,” and Managing Intellectual Property Magazine’s Impact Case of the Year.