Sharaz Gill
Managing Director, Skepsis Telecom
Sharaz is currently founder and managing director of Skepsis Telecom, a strawman patent invalidation company. His work is involves analysis of patent portfolios and preparing invalidity cases against individual patents.
Prior to founding Skepsis, Sharaz spent five years as head of HTC’s patent litigation and licensing functions for the EMEA region. In this role, he supervised HTC’s European patent litigation, defending HTC against patent infringement actions across the European Union against companies such as IPCom, Apple and Nokia. As head of licensing, Sharaz negotiated HTC’s essential and non-essential patent licences with all of the major telecoms patent owners, and therefore has a deep understanding of the global patent licensing space.
Before joining HTC, Sharaz was employed as European Patent Counsel at Qualcomm, where he supervised multi-jurisdictional patent cases, most notably, Qualcomm’s Europe-wide patent infringement actions against Nokia.
Sharaz has been directly involved in most of the major battles of the so-called ‘mobile phone wars’, including Qualcomm v Nokia, IPCom v HTC, Apple v HTC, Nokia v HTC and HTC v Gemalto which involved patent litigation spanning the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and The Netherlands. He is therefore well-qualified to opine on the subject of enforcement and strategy.