Senior Counsel - Patents

About the role

Wells Fargo is seeking a Senior Counsel - Patents to join the Intellectual Property Section of the Legal Department. In this role, you will serve as a strategic intellectual property advisor to the enterprise, helping shape and advance how the company creates, protects, and leverages innovation across areas such as artificial intelligence, payments, fraud prevention, digital banking, and enterprise technology. You will counsel business and technology leaders across the full range of intellectual property matters, provide strategic oversight of the outside counsel who prepare and prosecute the company's patent applications, and support intellectual property litigation and disputes as well as the intellectual property aspects of commercial, licensing, and strategic transactions. This is an opportunity to influence enterprise strategy at a leading financial institution, to partner directly with the innovators building the company's technology, and to help Wells Fargo navigate an increasingly complex and competitive intellectual property landscape.

Responsibilities

• Serve as a strategic advisor to business and technology leaders, partnering with them to identify, develop, and protect innovations aligned with Wells Fargo's strategic priorities.
• Lead invention harvesting activities, invention disclosure reviews, and innovation counseling efforts that translate business strategy into protectable intellectual property.
• Evaluate inventions and other innovations for patentability, strategic value, business impact, and portfolio fit, and recommend the protection approach that best advances enterprise objectives.
• Provide strategic oversight of outside counsel responsible for preparing and prosecuting patent applications, setting filing, claiming, and quality expectations and ensuring consistency across the portfolio.
• Conduct patentability assessments, competitive and landscape intelligence reviews, and freedom-to-operate analyses that inform product, investment, and go-to-market decisions.
• Build strong partnerships with inventors, engineers, software developers, architects, data scientists, and business leaders.
• Deliver intellectual property education and training programs that promote innovation and intellectual property awareness across the enterprise.
• Leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and legal technology tools to improve the efficiency, scalability, and quality of intellectual property counseling, outside counsel oversight, invention evaluation, portfolio management, and legal service delivery.
• Help shape the strategic priorities of the Intellectual Property Section and support continuous improvement initiatives that enhance intellectual property operations, reporting, analytics, and business impact.
• Support intellectual property litigation and disputes, including infringement and validity assessments, assertion and defense strategy, responses to third-party demand letters, and coordination with litigation counsel and outside counsel.
• Advise senior leadership on enterprise intellectual property strategy, policy, and governance, including emerging risks and opportunities presented by new technologies, partnerships, and business models.

Requirements

• 4+ years of Law experience, or equivalent demonstrated through work or education.
• Active State Bar membership or the equivalent in a country outside the United States.