Alex Harris is an associate in the San Francisco office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher.  He currently practices in the firm’s Litigation Department.  Mr. Harris focuses on appellate and intellectual property litigation.

Prior to joining the firm, Mr. Harris served as a law clerk to the Honorable Raymond M. Kethledge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.  He received his law degree from Stanford Law School, where he conducted advanced clinic coursework in Supreme Court litigation and edited the Stanford Technology Law Review.

Mr. Harris has argued before federal and state courts, at the trial and appellate levels, in paid and pro bono cases.  He has also served as Continuing Legal Education faculty and his work has appeared in the Maryland Journal of International Law and the Washington Legal Foundation’s Legal Opinion Letters.

Mr. Harris is licensed to practice law in the State of California and before the U.S. Supreme Court, the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the Federal, Sixth Circuit, and Ninth Circuits, and the U.S. District Courts for the Northern and Central Districts of California.

Mr. Harris’s representative matters include:

• Was the lead associate in a major Supreme Court patent case,  Alice v. CLS, 573 U.S. 208 (2014).  The Court unanimously held ineligible patents asserted against Gibson Dunn client CLS Bank claiming the abstract idea of escrow, implemented on a generic computer.  In naming Gibson Dunn the 2015 Litigation Department of the Year, the American Lawyer described Alice as “a gamechanger for Silicon Valley tech companies.”
• Successfully defended in the Second Circuit, and prevented Supreme Court review of, Gibson Dunn client NML Capital’s injunction ordering Argentina to abide by its contractual promise to provide equal treatment to NML’s bonds that Argentina had defaulted on.  Harris and the rest of the Gibson Dunn team then enforced the injunction against numerous subsequent challenges, culminating in NML recovering over $2.4 billion on the defaulted bonds.
• Won dismissal with prejudice of a putative consumer class action against a major technology company, in the first motion the court heard.
• In multiple separate cases, won affirmance of claim construction and summary judgment of non-infringement in the Federal Circuit.
• Represented patent holder in Hatch-Waxman suit where accused infringers abandoned their defenses before trial, and the Federal Circuit affirmed the final judgment upholding the patent term extension.
• Drafted several amicus briefs before the Supreme Court.
• In a pro bono representation, obtained dismissal of a criminal citation issued against food truck owners, leading Arlington County, Virginia to amend its food truck regulations