Ryan Abbott, M.D., Esq., FCIArb, has mediated and arbitrated domestic and international disputes with collectively billions of dollars at stake. This has included disputes between some of the world’s largest companies represented by some of the largest law firms, as well as disputes involving unrepresented individuals experiencing interpersonal disputes within family businesses. He has particular proficiency in the fields of intellectual property and health care, and offers unique experience in such matters as biologics, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, medical and life sciences, computer technology and distributed ledger technology. Dr. Abbott is also the co-creator of the JAMS AI Dispute Resolution Rules. He divides his time primarily between Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and London.

Dr. Abbott has a reputation for rigorous preparation, engagement and adaptability. As an arbitrator, he focuses on delivering fair and just outcomes efficiently and quickly. As a mediator, he takes a commercially oriented approach, aided by his diverse practice and educational background. Dr. Abbott firmly believes that mediation and arbitration provides all parties with the opportunity to achieve better outcomes than litigation—financial benefits, risk mitigation, and saved opportunity costs. He is driven to solve problems, and to help parties with ongoing collaborations to preserve or rebuild important relationships. 

Dr. Abbott has also been written by name into multiple dispute resolution clauses to help resolve disputes at various stages, or to help structure and manage dispute resolution processes.

Dr. Abbott has served as partner at a litigation firm and general counsel of biotechnology companies. In these capacities, he has substantial dispute resolution experience as outside and inside counsel for both claimants and respondents. Dr. Abbott has also been an expert testifying witness in state and federal courts on patent infringement and invalidity, as well as a medical expert witness. He has also worked as an expert for the European Commission, the United Kingdom Parliament, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). 

Dr. Abbott is a licensed physician and patent attorney in the United States (California and New York) and a solicitor advocate in England and Wales. He is board certified by the American Board of Legal Medicine. In addition to serving as a JAMS neutral, he is a CEDR, CPR, IACT, SIAC, WIPO and UKIPO panelist, a CEDR-accredited mediator and a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators (FCIArb). He also teaches mediation as a CEDR faculty member.

Dr. Abbott is professor of law and health sciences at the University of Surrey School of Law and adjunct associate professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. Among others, he is a graduate of Yale Law School and the University of California San Diego School of Medicine. Dr. Abbott routinely publishes and lectures on issues related to dispute resolution, as well as artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and information and communication technologies.

He is also a Title IX external Hearing Officer and Adjudicator for colleges in sexual assault and harassment cases, including training in college-specific Policies & Procedures. 

Areas of Focus and Industries Served:

Representative Matters

• Appellate
• Chaired arbitral appellate panel
• Business Commercial
• Disputes regarding partnership agreements, joint venture agreements, and business dissolutions
• Disputes regarding licensing agreements, franchise agreements, supply agreements, service agreements, consulting agreements, scientific advisory agreements, commercialization agreements, development agreements, distribution agreements
• Board member disputes, disputes between boards and executives, inter-management disputes
• Claims of fraud
• Disputes involving auditing provisions 
• Disputes involving commercially reasonable efforts
• Disputes related to asset valuations
• Disputes related to corporate (and personal) bankruptcy and insolvency
• Disputes related to service bundling
• Disputes involving misuse of confidential information and trade secret theft, patent, trademark, and copyright infringement
• Disputes over sales of goods and services
• Claims of fiduciary duty violations
• Disputes regarding stock options, equity valuation, and sales of unregistered securities
• Disputes involving asset (APA) and share purchase agreements (SPA) 
• Shareholder and derivative disputes
• Breach of warrantees and covenants
• Disputes involving mergers and acquisitions
• Disputes involving due diligence
• Claims of tortuous interference
• Disputes between manufacturers, distributors, and sub-distributors
• Claims of statutory violations and usurious financing, violations of consumer protection laws, and marketing violations
• Claims of anti-trust violations and anti-competitive behavior for anti-steering activity, pricing policies
• Contracts
• Disputes alleging breach of contract, third-party beneficiaries, contract validity and enforceability, oral and written contracts, performance and modification, interpretation and statutory interpretation, good faith and fair dealing, assignment, fraud, statute of limitations, waiver, novation, duress, mistake, damages, mitigation
• Digital Assets and Web3.0
• Disputes involving valuation of digital assets and non-fungible tokens
• Disputes involving cryptocurrencies and smart contracts
• Disputes involving distributed ledger and blockchain technologies
• Disputes involving initial coin offerings and security and exchange commission (SEC) investigations 
• Emergency Arbitration & Interim Relief
• Resolved requests for interim relief as emergency arbitrator along with requests for interim and injunctive relief on a non-emergency basis
• Employment Law
• Disputes of wrongful termination, discrimination (including based on age, sex, sexual orientation, gender, religion), state and federal statutory violations, retaliation, whistleblowing, hostile workplaces, negligent and intentional infliction of emotional distress, defamation and slander
• Pre-dispute interpersonal workplace conflict resolution and process management
• Disputes of non-payment of wages, non-compliance with state and federal statutory schemes
• Disputes involving employment classification, violations of non-disclosure, non-solicitation, non-competition agreements
• Disputes regarding stock options, vesting, bonuses, and loan forgiveness
• Claims under Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and state and local statutes
• Information Technology
• Disputes involving pharmaceutical, biotechnology, medical device, diagnostics, and vaccines
• Disputes involving R&D, commercialization, manufacturing, technology transfer, and intellectual property 
• Disputes involving commercially reasonable efforts in a variety of contexts
• Disputes involving supply and distribution agreements
• Disputes involving commercialization agreements
• Disputes regarding sublicenses
• Disputes involving technology transfer and local manufacturing
• Disputes regarding funding and valuation of assets and intellectual property
• Disputes concerning physician practice breakups
• Employment disputes between health care providers and facilities, practice groups, and hospitals 
• Disputes regarding plan participation and exclusion
• Disputes involving intellectual property between universities and private parties
• Inventorship and authorship disputes
• Employment claims involving senior executives 
• Employment claims involving employees and contractors
• Claims of medical negligence
• Claims of product liability and design defects
• Disputes involving informed consent
• Disputes involving clinical trial enrollment
• Disputes involving violations of HIPAA and data privacy laws
• Disputes involving academic dishonesty
• Allegations of misappropriation of confidential information and trade secret theft
• FRAND/SEP disputes
• Disputes involving authorization for experimental procedures
• Disputes involving reimbursement and disputes between insurers, providers, and facilities
• Insurance
• Disputes involving coverage, bad faith, first-party claims, third-party claims, directors and officers (D&O) and errors and omissions (E&O) policies, reinsurance
• Disputes between brokers and carriers, carriers and reinsurers, policy holders and carriers
• Intellectual Property
• Patent, trademark, copyright, trade secret and confidential information, infringement, misappropriation, validity, license disputes, ownership, regulatory filings, technology transfer
• Patent infringement cases involving chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, pharmaceuticals, telecommunication technologies, computer science technologies
• Life Sciences and Health Care
• Disputes involving pharmaceutical, biotechnology, medical device, diagnostics, and vaccines
• Disputes involving R&D, commercialization, manufacturing, technology transfer, and intellectual property 
• Disputes involving commercially reasonable efforts in a variety of contexts
• Disputes involving supply and distribution agreements
• Disputes involving commercialization agreements
• Disputes regarding sublicenses
• Disputes involving technology transfer and local manufacturing
• Disputes regarding funding and valuation of assets and intellectual property
• Disputes concerning physician practice breakups
• Employment disputes between health care providers and facilities, practice groups, and hospitals 
• Disputes regarding plan participation and exclusion
• Disputes involving intellectual property between universities and private parties
• Inventorship and authorship disputes
• Employment claims involving senior executives 
• Employment claims involving employees and contractors
• Claims of medical negligence
• Claims of product liability and design defects
• Disputes involving informed consent
• Disputes involving clinical trial enrollment
• Disputes involving violations of HIPAA and data privacy laws
• Disputes involving academic dishonesty
• Allegations of misappropriation of confidential information and trade secret theft
• FRAND/SEP disputes
• Disputes involving authorization for experimental procedures
• Disputes involving reimbursement and disputes between insurers, providers, and facilities
• Professional Liability
• Negligence, billing disputes, malpractice, accounting
• Medical malpractice
• Attorney malpractice and fee disputes, including multi-party disputes and disputes involving litigation finance
• Accountancy malpractice 
• Disputes involving breach of contract, account stated, quantum meruit, promissory estoppel, and unjust enrichment
• Disputes regarding conflicts of interest
• Real Property
• Disputes involving commercial leases
• Disputes involving property valuation
• Disputes involving lending and financing for real estate
• Disputes involving unsafe conditions
• Disputes regarding liens
• Regulatory
• Adjudicated claim between a regulatory body and an applicant denied marketing approval for a medical device
• Tort
• Disputes alleging wrongful injury and wrongful death
• Claims of negligence comparative fault, customary practices, negligent hiring and supervision, superseding causes, complex causation, assumption of risk  
• Claims for fraud, fraudulent inducement, conversion, theft, inducing breach of contract, intentional interference with prospective economic relations
• Claims of civil rights violations
• Disputes regarding agency and vicarious liability

Honors, Memberships, and Professional Activities

Memberships

• Executive Committee Member, Los Angeles County Bar Association (LACBA) Attorney Client Mediation and Arbitration Services (ACMAS), 2021 – present
• Member, International Coordinating Committee (ICC) Administrative Director of the Business Law Section Dispute Resolution Committee, 2021 – present
• Inaugural Chair, Cross-Border Disputes Subcommittee, 2020 – present
• Member, American Bar Association, 2019 – present
• Member, Global Health Law Committee of the International Law Association (ILA) 2019 – present
• Co-Chair, AI Subcommittee, American Intellectual Property Law Association (AIPLA) Emerging Technologies Committee, 2020–2023
• Editor, Landslide Magazine, published by the American Bar Association Section of Intellectual Property Law (ABA-IPL), 2019–2023
• Academic College Reviewer, Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Peer Review College, 2017– 2020
• Member, European Commission Expert Working Group on New Technologies Formation, 2018–2019
• Member, Judge Paul R. Michel Intellectual Property American Inn of Court, 2014–2016
• Board of Governors, Valley Community Healthcare, 2013–2016

Awards and Honors

• Strategy IAM Global Leader 300, 2023 & 2024
• IAM Strategy 300, 2022, 2023, 2024 
• Outstanding IP Practitioner, World Intellectual Property Review (WIPR), 2022 & 2023
• 50 Most Influential People in IP, Managing Intellectual Property, 2019 & 2021

Select Recent Lectures

• 2020 LSPN Connect; Speaker: Artificial Intelligence and Intellectual Property in the Life Sciences
• 2019 Israel Patent Office; Speaker: Artificial Intelligence and Intellectual Property
• 2019 Israel Patent Office, Israel Innovation Authority, WIPO; Panelist & Speaker: International Conference on Emerging Technologies and Intellectual Property—Connecting the Bits
• 2019 Intellectual Property Office in the United Kingdom, in co-operation with the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO); Speaker: Conference on the potential impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on intellectual property (IP)
• 2019 International Conference on Emerging Technologies and Intellectual Property – Connecting the Bits; Panelist: Applications of AI - New Business and IP Strategies
• 2019 Moho D-Day Summit; Presenter: The Future of Work
• 2019 EUIPO: IP Mediation Conference; Presenter: The Future of Online Mediation – AI Mediators and AI Evaluative Tools
• 2018 3rd International Convention on The Economy of Innovation, AIPPI; Panelist: Traditional Medicine—The Influence of IP on Commercial Use and Economic Aspects
• 2018 Oxford Faculty of Law, Business Law Workshop, Inventive Machines and the Evolving Nature of Innovation
• 2018 Office of Intellectual Property of the Ministry of Economy, Institute of Intellectual Property
  Luxembourg; Presenter: 11th Annual Luxembourg Intellectual Property Day: Artificial Intelligence and Intellectual Property Challenges
• 2018 Stanford Law School; Presenter: We Robot Conference: Everything Is Obvious; Should Robots Pay Taxes? Tax Policy in the Age of Automation
• 2018 King’s Transnational Law Summit; Moderator: A World of Risk: Health, Technology and the Human Life; Panelist: Us and Them: Living With Robots
• 2018 University of Surrey; Chair: Surrey Workshop on the Regulation of AI
• 2018 University of San Diego; Presenter: PatCon 8: The Annual Patent Conference; Everything Is Obvious
• 2018 King’s College London; Guest Lecturer: Transnational Intellectual Property
• 2018 ICEVOX; Presenter: Cybercrime and Security, Bitcoin and the Power of Decentralized Prediction Markets
• 2018 WIPO/Rospatent/Skolkovo; Panelist: International Conference on Intellectual Property in the New Technological Order, International Protections for Computer-Generated Works
• 2017 IBC Leal; Moderator and Panelist: Standards, Patents and Competition Conference, Future of Patenting for AI-Created Innovations
• 2017 CEIPI/WIPO/INPI Lecturer: Advanced Course on Intellectual Property, Technology Transfer and Licensing
  Intellectual Property Management in Traditional Medical Knowledge
• 2017 Leeds School of Law; Roundtable Participant: Personalized Medicine and the Law
• 2017 CEIPI/BETA/I3PM Conference; Speaker: Intellectual Property and Digitalization: Challenges for Intellectual Property Management, Creative Computers and the Future of Patent Law
• 2017 Florida State University; Law 7930: Global Health and Pharmaceutical Regulation, Global Regulation of Off-Label Drug Use and Traditional Medicine
• 2017 Czech Parliament Committee on Health; Roundtable Presenter, U.S. Regulation and Legislation on Traditional Chinese Medicine

Publications

• "Elgar Concise Encyclopedia of Artificial Intelligence and the Law" (Ryan Abbott & Elizabeth Rothman, eds.), Edward Elgar Publishing (forthcoming 2025)
• "International Intellectual Property In An Integrated World Economy" (with Frederick Abbott, et al.), 5th ed., Aspen Publishers (2024) 
• "Disrupting Creativity: Copyright Law in the Age of Generative Artificial Intelligence" (with Elizabeth Rothman), Florida Law Review (2023)
• "Putting the Artificial Intelligence in Alternative Dispute Resolution: How AI Rules Will Become ADR Rules" (with Brinson Elliott), 2 Amicus Curiae 4(3) (2023)
• "AI-Generated Output and Intellectual Property Rights: Takeaways from the Artificial Inventor Project" (with Elizabeth Rothman), 45 European Intellectual Property Review (2023)
• "DABUS Down Under—AI at Work in Australia and Around the World" (with Claire Gregg), 129 Intellectual Property Forum 32 (2022)
• "Intellectual Property and Artificial Intelligence: An Introduction," Research Handbook on Intellectual Property and Artificial Intelligence, Edward Elgar (Ryan Abbott ed., 2022)
• "A Brief Analysis of DABUS, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of Patent Law" (with Rita Matulionyte and Paul Nolan), 125 Intellectual Property Forum 10 (2021)
• "The Reasonable Robot: Artificial Intelligence and the Law," Cambridge University Press (2020)
• "Punishing Artificial Intelligence: Legal Fiction or Science Fiction" (with Alex Sarch), UC Davis Law Review (Forthcoming 2019)
• “Artificial Intelligence, Big Data and Intellectual Property: Protecting Computer-Generated Works in the United Kingdom,” Research Handbook on Intellectual Property and Digital Technologies, Edward Elgar (Tanya Aplin, ed.) (2019)
• "What Crypto Exchanges, Holders Can Learn From QuadrigaCX" (co-author), Law360 (2019)
• "Everything is Obvious," 66 UCLA. L. REV. 2 (2019)
• "Managing Disputes in the Life Sciences," Nature Biotechnology (2018)
• "Should Robots Pay Taxes? Tax Policy in the Age of Automation," 12 Harv. L. & Pol. Rev. 145 (2018)
• "The Reasonable Computer: Disrupting the Paradigm of Tort Liability," 86 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 1 (2018)
• “The Sentinel Initiative as a Cultural Commons” In Governing Medical Research Commons, Cambridge University Press (Katherine Strandburg, et al., eds.) (2017)
• "I Think, Therefore I Invent: Creative Computers and the Future of Patent Law," 57 B.C. L. Rev. 1079 (2016)
• “Big Data and Its Use by Artificial Intelligence.” In Big Data Is Not a Monolith, MIT Press (Hamid Ekbia, et al., eds.) (2016)
• "Evidence and Extrapolation: Mechanisms for Regulating Off-Label Uses of Drugs and Devices," 64 Duke L.J. 377 (2014).
• "Documenting Traditional Medical Knowledge," World Intellectual Property Organization (2014)
• "FDA Involvement in Off-Label Use: Debate Between Richard Epstein and Ryan Abbott," 44 Sw. L. Rev. 1 (2014)
• "Redefining Medical Necessity: A Consumer-Driven Solution to the U.S. Health Care Crisis," 47 Loy. L.A. L. Rev. 943 (2014)
• "Balancing Access and Innovation in India's Shifting IP Regime, Remarks (2014)" 35 Whittier Law Review 341 (2014)
• "Big Data and Pharmacovigilance: Using Healthcare Information Exchanges to Revolutionize Drug Safety," 99 Iowa L. Rev. 225 (2013)
• "Medico-Legal Issues in Cardiology," Cardiol Rev. 2013 Sep-Oct; 21(5):222-8.

Background and Education

• Ph.D., University of Surrey School of Law, 2020 
• Solicitor Advocate, England and Wales, 2017–present
• Attorney, California and New York (licensed), 2012–present    
• Patent Attorney, United States Patent and Trademark Office, 2011–present
• Partner; Brown, Neri, Smith & Khan, LLP; 2016–present
• General Counsel and Medical Director, Abcentra, LLC, 2014–2021
• Of Counsel, One LLP, 2013–2016
• Associate Professor, Southwestern Law School, 2012–2016
• Intern Physician, Santa Clara Valley Medical Center, 2011–2012
• M.D., University of California, San Diego, 2011
• J.D., Yale Law School, 2011
• M.T.O.M., Emperor’s College, 2005
• B.S., University of California, Los Angeles, 2005
• Foreign Language Immersion Program (Mandarin Chinese), Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Summer 2002