J. Thomas McCarthy is a nationally renowned authority on trademarks and unfair competition and on the rights of publicity. He is a Senior Professor of Law at the University of San Francisco and founding director of the McCarthy Institute for Intellectual Property & Technology Law.

Mr. McCarthy is a trademark consultant to some of the nation's largest consumer marketing companies and is the author of the well-known six volume treatise, McCarthy on Trademarks and Unfair Competition (published by Thomson-West) which has been relied upon as authority in over 1500 judicial opinions. He is also the author of the two-volume treatise The Rights of Publicity and Privacy (Second edition, 2000), and McCarthy's Desk Encyclopedia of Intellectual Property (Third edition, 2004). Who's Who Legal has named Thomas McCarthy its 2005 global Trademarks Lawyer of the Year, as determined through peer nominations and interviews. In addition, Mr. McCarthy is listed in The Best Lawyers in America (2006) as a leader in the fields of Information Technology and Intellectual Property law.

Mr. McCarthy began his legal career in the Offices of Julian Caplan in San Francisco in 1963, joining the faculty at the University of San Francisco School of Law three years later. He was Of Counsel at Townsend & Townsend from 1974 to 1983. In 1983 he joined Limbach & Limbach as Of Counsel consultant and remained until the closure of that firm in December 2000. He joined Morrison & Foerster LLP in January 2001.