Alison Tucher is a partner in the firm’s Intellectual Property Group, handling patent cases and a variety of other commercial and intellectual property disputes. She regularly litigates in U.S. courts and international arbitral tribunals, and has led international patent litigation teams.
Ms. Tucher’s trial practice at Morrison & Foerster has resulted in numerous successes, some with precedential results. For example, on a writ for a patent case headed to trial, she successfully established the scope of work-product immunity for opinion counsel’s papers. See In re EchoStar, 448 F.3d 1294 (Fed. Cir. 2006). For a client whose federal False Claims Act case went to trial, she achieved dismissal of the parallel state-law case on Noerr-Pennington (First Amendment right to petition) grounds—the first time that doctrine had been successfully used in a false claims act case. And a recent San Jose case in which Ms. Tucher played a key role was dubbed by the business press the “patent trial of the century.”
Ms. Tucher’s appellate experience began as a law clerk. She clerked for Justice David Souter of the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge William Norris of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
After clerking, Ms. Tucher tried 19 criminal cases to juries in Santa Clara County. Continuing in criminal law at Morrison & Foerster, Ms. Tucher has twice—for clients in unrelated cases—won the freedom of a man wrongfully imprisoned for a murder he did not commit.
Ms. Tucher also teaches trade-secret law at Stanford Law School, and serves on the board of governors of the Northern California Chapter of the Association of Business Trial Lawyers.
Ms. Tucher is included in Benchmark Litigation’s 2012 and 2013 lists of the “Top 250 Women in Litigation,” and has been named one of its “Local Litigation Stars of California” for 2013. Super Lawyers magazine lists Ms. Tucher among its 2013 Northern California “Super Lawyers.” And for her exoneration work in 2003, Ms. Tucher received the President’s Service Award from the Santa Clara County Trial Lawyers Association and was profiled on CBS News’ The Early Show as an “American Hero.” While a student, Ms. Tucher received Harry S. Truman and Herchel Smith Scholarships, was elected to the Order of the Coif, and served as book review editor for the Stanford Law Review.