Melanye K. Johnson is the Acting Deputy Chief Administrative Trademark Judge of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB). Judge Johnson was appointed to the TTAB by the U.S. Secretary of Commerce in February 2020.
Prior to joining the Board, Judge Johnson served for over eleven years as a Senior Attorney in the Office of the General Counsel for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in Bethesda, Maryland. At HHS, she practiced in the areas of intellectual property and technology transfer law generally, and she was the department’s lead attorney for trademark matters, serving agencies such as the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. While she was at HHS, Judge Johnson also served in different roles, including Special Assistant to the General Counsel and Acting Director of Management Policy for the Office of the General Counsel.
Preceding Judge Johnson entering public service, she was Senior Counsel for trademark and copyright law at E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company (“DuPont”) in Wilmington, Delaware. One of her many achievements at DuPont was being one of the architects of the company’s first brand protection center, created to combat counterfeiting of company products worldwide. Judge Johnson began her career as a litigator of patent, trademark, copyright, and general commercial law cases at firms in Detroit, Michigan, and Washington, D.C. She also served as a law clerk to Judge Eric L. Clay of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.
Judge Johnson earned her bachelor’s degree, with honors, from the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), and her law degree from The Ohio State University College of Law, where she was an Articles Editor for The Ohio State Journal on Dispute Resolution. She is licensed to practice in Michigan, the District of Columbia, and Delaware (in-house counsel, inactive).