Nathaniel T. Quirk

Nate Quirk focuses his practice on securing and protecting intellectual property rights in the areas of patents, trademarks, copyrights, and trade secrets. Leveraging his prior experience as chief intellectual property counsel for a publicly-traded technology company, Nate excels at providing strategic counseling at the intersection of intellectual property protection and business strategy. Nate provides guidance on portfolio development and management strategies that are cost-effective and have a business impact for his clients.

In addition to substantial experience drafting and prosecuting domestic and foreign patent and trademark applications, Nate also provides transactional services and counsel regarding joint development, intellectual property ownership, patent and trademark licensing, and software licensing. He also assists clients with ascertaining and managing third-party clearance risks, particularly with respect to complex patent rights, and provides strategic guidance on product development considerations and design-arounds, and risk mitigation via legal opinions.

Nate’s technical background is focused in electrical engineering, and more specifically electrical power.  Nate has drafted patent applications in a broad spectrum of the electrical arts including power storage and transmission technologies.  He has drafted patent applications directed to battery management systems (BMS), battery cell configurable interconnection systems, dynamic impedance balancing systems, cross-pack impedance balancing, thermodynamic cooling systems, battery cell/thermoelectric device integration, micro-scale battery technologies, power quality compensation systems, isolated power system (mini-grid) source/load management, portable battery charging systems, inductive charging with field sensing/modification, battery efficient load management, and others.

Prior to his legal career, Nate was a principal electrical engineer at an electric utility in Florida and Nate continues to maintain his licensure as a Professional Engineer in the State of Florida. Nate brings a vast degree of technical knowledge to his practice, due to his electrical power work experience and his continued technical development through his work with long-term client engagements in the areas of power systems, storage systems, wireless communications, electronics, software, optics, and mechanical systems. This technical knowledge and ability to learn allows him to quickly understand clients’ technical innovations and develop strategies for protecting those innovations.

• Listed in The Best Lawyers in America®: Patent Law since 2022; Trademark Law since 2024

• Member, Leadership North Carolina (LNC) (2023)
• Member, North Carolina State Bar (2007-present)
• Professional Engineer, Florida Board of Professional Engineers (2004-present)
• Member, Carolina Patent, Trademark, & Copyright Law Association (2007-present)

Paralegal

Derek Olguin
(704) 347-6461
dolguin@burr.com