Tiffini (Smith) Hines is an associate in the law firm of McDermott Will & Emery LLP and is based in the Chicago office. She is a member of the Firm’s Intellectual Property, Media and Technology Department, where she concentrates her practice on intellectual property licensing, litigation and counseling.
Tiffini has substantive intellectual property transactional experience. Her transactional practice includes due diligence and compliance issues in large-scale IT/IP-focused M&A and private equity transactions as well as data protection and licensing.
Tiffini, in part, focuses her practice on patent litigation, including cases involving internet technology, electrical financial systems, chipset technology, lighting mechanisms, nanotechnology and medical devices, as well as patent and trademark prosecution.
From 2005 to 2007, through a Firm arranged part-time secondment, Tiffini served as in-house IP Counsel for an international agricultural biotechnology company. As in-house IP Counsel, Tiffini was responsible for managing all of the company’s IP needs, including U.S. and international trademark and patent prosecution, trademark opposition proceedings, IP counseling, negotiating and drafting IP licenses, and developing the company’s overall IP strategy.
Tiffini recently completed a six-month Firm arranged part-time secondment ending in June 2008 where she served as in-house IP Counsel for an international non-profit organization. Her primary responsibilities included managing the company’s trademark and copyright needs, with particular emphasis on copyright acquisition, domain name disputes as well as trademark opposition and litigation proceedings.
Tiffini also practices a significant amount of trademark prosecution. She manages all international trademark maintenance, prosecution and oppositions for an international beverage company with a foreign trademark portfolio of approximately 600 trademarks in roughly 50 countries.
While in law school, Tiffini was a founding member and co-Editor-in-Chief of the Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property from 2002-2004. Concurrently, she served as a staff member and senior editor of the Northwestern Journal of International Law and Business.
During her tenure at Northwestern, Tiffini also co-authored A Profile of Dolby Laboratories: An Effective Model for Leveraging Intellectual Property, 2 Nw. J. of Tech. & Intell. Prop. 1, http://www.law.northwestern.edu/journals/njtip/v2/n1/4/ (2002).
Prior to attending law school, Tiffini obtained her B.S., with honors, in electrical engineering and her M.S. in electrical and computer engineering. She focused her graduate studies in communications and signal processing, performing research in speech recognition and voice synthesis.
Tiffini is admitted to practice before the Supreme Court of Illinois and the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.
Additionally, Tiffini presently serves as a Board of Directors Member for the PianoForte Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the arts, such as promoting concerts for Chicago classical and jazz pianists.
Education
- Northwestern University School of Law, J.D., 2004
- Purdue University, M.S., 2001
- Southern University and A&M College, B.S. (with honors), 1999
