Coke Morgan Stewart is the Deputy Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Deputy Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). By statute, she is currently serving as the Acting Under Secretary and Acting Director. As the acting chief executive, she leads one of the largest intellectual property (IP) offices in the world—a $4.2B operation with over 13,500 employees located across the 50 states and Puerto Rico. She is also the principal IP advisor to the President and Administration, through the Secretary of Commerce.
Ms. Stewart worked at the USPTO for ten years, from 2011 to 2021, and re-joined the agency on January 20, 2025. During her tenure at the USPTO, Coke served in many important roles, including as Acting Deputy Under Secretary and Acting Deputy Director, Acting Chief of Staff, Counsel to the Director, Senior Policy Advisor, Acting Deputy Solicitor, and Associate Solicitor. In these roles, she defended agency decisions in federal court and advised multiple administrations on a wide array of legal and policy matters, from patent eligibility to drug pricing to artificial intelligence. She was honored with numerous awards, including “Litigator of the Year” and Special Act Awards for her work supporting the agency during the pandemic and the 2020-2021 presidential transition.
Ms. Stewart has a distinguished career in intellectual property litigation. She has handled 70 appeals before the U.S. Court of Appeal for the Federal Circuit. She has advised the Department of Justice Civil Appellate Staff and the Office of the Solicitor General on dozens of patent, trademark, and copyright cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. And she has overseen administrative law cases, defending agency practices and procedures in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia and the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
In private practice, Ms. Stewart represented both patent holders and accused infringers in patent infringement cases throughout the United States, including in the Eastern District of Texas. In one of her first patent cases, she successfully represented a small technology company in a patent litigation that resulted in the eighth-largest jury verdict in federal court that year and the then-largest patent infringement jury award in Eastern District of Virginia.
Ms. Stewart most recently practiced law at O’Melveny & Myers LLP in the Intellectual Property and Technology group. Prior to that, she served as Deputy Attorney General for the Commonwealth of Virginia, supervising 150 attorneys and professionals in the areas of healthcare, education, and social services, and overseeing hundreds of active federal and state court cases and internal investigations. Prior to her Deputy Attorney General role, she taught Appellate Advocacy at the Regent University School of Law.
Ms. Stewart is a graduate of Duke University cum laude and the University of Virginia School of Law, where she served as Executive Editor of the Virginia Tax Review and Editor-in-Chief of the Virginia Law Weekly. After law school, Ms. Stewart clerked on the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, which hears monetary claims against the U.S. government, including patent cases.