Roger M Milgrim

Roger M. Milgrim (born March 22, 1937 in New York City) is an intellectual property lawyer, and the author of two multivolume law treatises: Milgrim on Trade Secrets (published in 1967 and updated three times per year: in 2015, in its 110th edition and comprising five volumes) and Milgrim on Licensing (published in 1990 and updated twice annually: in 2015, in its 42d update and comprising four volumes). Beginning in about 2007, these two treatises were updated by Eric E. Bensen, of the New York Bar, and Roger Milgrim. These two treatises are companions to other major intellectual property treatises in the LexisNexis IP series, which includes Chisum on Patents and Nimmer on Copyright, which are cited by the U.S. Supreme Court and other courts, including by the Court in Kimble v. Marvel Entertainment LLC, 135 S. Ct. 2401, 2408 (2015). In late 2012 Milgrim's Guide to IP Licensing was published Wolters Kluwer.

Milgrim was a Root-Tilden Scholar at NYU School of Law, and won the National First Prize in the Nathan Burkan competition, awarded by the American Society of Authors, Composers & Publishers (ASCAP) for his essay on territoriality of copyright. He did graduate comparative law studies at NYU and the University of Paris School of Law as a Ford Foundation Fellow and a Fulbright Scholar. He was the first American associate in the Paris office of Baker & McKenzie, then the largest international law firm, and entered practice in New York as an associate in Nixon, Mudge, Rose, Guthrie, Alexander & Mitchell, where he served as a personal attorney to Richard Nixon, later the 37th president of the United States, and as the senior associate in the case that Mr. Nixon argued before the U.S. Supreme Court, Hill v. Time, Inc., 385 U.S. 374 (1967). That case explored the relationship of the First Amendment and the Right of Privacy.

In 1968, Milgrim co-founded the firm of Milgrim Thomajan & Lee. By 1992 it had grown from two to 160 lawyers in five cities (NY, Boston, Austin (Texas), Washington, DC, and Los Angeles). In 1992 Milgrim and his firm’s intellectual property group joined the New York office of the law firm of Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker, a prominent international law firm, where he served as a senior partner and held such positions as the head of the Firm’s intellectual property group and the Firm’s litigation department.

In addition to practice, Milgrim taught trade secret and intellectual property law at NYU School of Law for over two decades, and has also lectured at law schools including Columbia, Fordham, Houston, Kansas, Loyola (Chicago), Stanford, Texas and Yale. He has been a principal speaker before many bar associations, including those of California, Illinois, Michigan, New York and Texas. He was one of four speakers at the Tokyo Press Club where the then new Japanese Unfair Competition Prevention Law was discussed before an audience of Japanese executives and lawyers; the other three speakers were the heads of the Japanese and U.S. patent offices and a professor from the Max Planck Institute (Japanese law is based on the German Civil Code). Milgrim was the first Dean’s Distinguished Lecturer at the Annenberg School for Communication of the University of Pennsylvania, which lecture, the following year, was given by Cass Sunstein, professor of law (then at the University of Chicago) and currently the Advisor to the White House for Information and Regulatory Affairs, advising president Barack Obama.

Milgrim has also lectured to numerous legal departments, including AT&T, Eastman Kodak, Exxon, PPG, Procter & Gamble and United Technologies. In addition to an active transactional and litigation practice, he has acted as a lawyer’s lawyer, serving as an expert witness in the field of trade secret and intellectual property licensing practices in over 45 litigations and domestic and international arbitrations, having been retained by a wide variety of law firms including Baker Botts, Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, Dechert, Gibson, Dunn, Hogan & Hartson, Keker & Van Nest, Kenyon & Kenyon, Kirkland & Ellis, Latham & Watkins, Morrison & Foerster, Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, Quinn Emanuel, Skadden Arps, Sullivan & Cromwell, White & Case and Wilson Sonsini.

Milgrim has served on the boards of directors of Technip (a Paris-based NYSE-Euronext major international engineering firm, which is one of the CAC 40 public companies, the French equivalent of the Dow Jones Industrial Average), Coflexip-Stenna, and on the boards of not for profits, such as The Fulbright Association and The Brooklyn Hospital.