Practice Summary
Dr. Carol L. Francis, one of the founding partners of Bozicevic, Field & Francis LLP, brings to the firm a wealth of technical and legal knowledge in the life sciences fields, with special expertise in the fields of molecular biology, microbiology, immunology, diagnostics, drug discovery, pharmaceuticals and medical therapies. In addition to patent application drafting and prosecution, Carol does a significant amount of validity and infringement opinion work as well as freedom to operate analyses.
Carol received a J.D. with Distinction from Stanford University in 1998, a Ph.D. from the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Stanford University in 1993, and a Bachelor of Arts in Chemistry with Honors from the University of Missouri, Columbia in 1987. While an undergraduate, she was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, an honorary academic society, and Phi Lambda Upsilon, an honorary chemical society.
As a graduate student in the laboratory of Dr. Stanley Falkow, she studied in the field of bacterial pathogenesis, and wrote her doctoral dissertation on the interactions of enteropathogenic Escherichia coli and Salmonella typhimurium with epithelial cells. Her scientific research and findings have been published in respected journals such as Nature (see Francis et al., “Ruffles induced by Salmonella and other stimuli direct macropinocytosis of bacteria”, Nature, Vol. 364, August 12, 1993, pp. 639-42). During the course of her graduate studies, Carol presented her work at various conferences in the U.S. and abroad including The Gordon Conference on Microbial Toxins and Pathogenesis in New Hampshire, the European Molecular Biology Organization conference in Arolla, Switzerland, and the 1993 Bristol-Myers Squibb Symposium on Infectious Disease Research: “The Cellular and Molecular Biology of Bacterial-Host Cell Interactions.”
During the course of her legal training at Stanford Law School, Carol was a co-founder of the Stanford Technology Law Review – Stanford’s first internet-based law review. She was also an article editor for the Environmental Law Journal. In her first year at Stanford she received the Hilmer Oehlmann, Jr. Award for Legal Research and Writing.
Prior to becoming a partner at Bozicevic, Field & Francis LLP in 1999, Carol amassed six years of valuable experience as a Patent Agent, including four years in the Menlo Park office of Fish & Richardson LLP.
Carol currently represents a wide variety of clients, ranging from universities and start-up companies to well known, larger biotech companies. Carol’s clients benefit significantly from her broad legal expertise in the field of intellectual property, as well as from her substantial background in drafting patent applications and prosecuting them to issuance in the U.S. and internationally.
Carol is admitted to practice in California, and is registered to practice before the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
