Areas of Practice

Budget & Approps | IP Law | IP Policy | Judiciary Committee | Tech Sector | Energy & Environment

Although the nuances of the federal government’s budget process may not be the most exciting, federal public spending drives investment in the private sector through incentives for specified businesses in addition to direct funding support for the priority objectives of the federal government.

Joe’s recent work as Chief Counsel to the Senate Budget Committee during the 2019 and 2020 reconciliation process that led to the American Rescue Plan and the Inflation Reduction Act put him at the center of these reconciliation efforts. Joe has rare knowledge of the unique Senate Byrd Bath procedures that controls how the overall reconciliation process works.

Budget

and

Appropriations

Intellectual

Property

Law

Joe’s extensive background in intellectual property law and policy gives him the ability to understand not just the law, but the reasons behind it including the associated legislative documents critical to successfully making an argument in court.

Joe works extensively on Copyright Claims Board cases and has submitted multiple amicus briefs to the Second Circuit on behalf of several international publishing organizations and a music trade association.

Joe is a Practitioner in Residence at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University where he teaches law students about copyright law and the Copyright Claims Board.

Intellectual

Property

Policy

Joe is the only person to have served as Chief Intellectual Property Counsel of both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate giving him an unprecedented knowledge of how to move, and when necessary not move, intellectual property legislation through Congress.

Joe’s work has included a range of copyright, trademark, and patent issues including the 2019 IP package containing the CASE Act, the felony streaming provision, and the Trademark Modernization Act. Joe was the lead counsel on the Music Modernization Act that has returned over $1 billion in mechanical royalties to artists. Joe was also responsible for the Family Movie Act, the Fraudulent Online Identity Sanctions Act, and the Innovation Act.

Judiciary

Committee

Issues

As the former General Counsel of the Senate Judiciary Committee under then Chairman Lindsey Graham, Joe has a deep understanding of business critical issues that come before the Judiciary Committees including corporate mergers, antitrust, arbitration, litigation funding, immigration, public and private prisons, privacy, civil rights, and corporate investigations.

Technology

Sector

Issues

Joe’s experience with tech sector issues began in the early 2000s when he joined the Business Software Alliance, now known as BSA, the Software Alliance, after authoring the first federal anti-spam legislation.

While at BSA, Joe led their pro-encryption coalition Americans for Computer Privacy (ACP) in a successful effort to increase the legally permissible maximum bit length for exported encryption keys from 40 bits to 128 bits.

Energy and

Environmental

Policy

Joe’s work experience in energy and environmental policy combines his time working for Senator Murkowski of Alaska on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and his LEED certification giving him a knowledge of this sector. Joe has worked on issues ranging from oil and gas development, nuclear waste, to mineral extraction. One of Joe’s early wind power projects was a cold weather test facility in Kotzebue, Alaska.

Joe’s recent work as Chief Counsel to the Senate Budget Committee during the 2019 and 2020 reconciliation process also put him at the center of the debate over commercial sand residential tax incentives for new energy projects as well as battery vehicles.