Kevin J. Zilka
Principal
Kevin Zilka is a registered patent attorney with more than 30 years of experience in intellectual property law. He has been repeatedly recognized as one of the world’s leading 300 IP strategists by Intellectual Asset Management (IAM) magazine. As co-founder of Zilka-Kotab PC, he built and leads a strong team of patent practitioners and has helped clients turn strategically built patent portfolios into significant revenue through high-stakes licensing negotiations.
Kevin specializes in strategic patent portfolio development and management. He focuses on aggressive yet thoughtful procurement that delivers both offensive and defensive positioning aligned with real business objectives. He pioneered best practices for integrating competitive intelligence into the patent process and developed a patented software tool to improve strategic claim positioning during prosecution. His work has directly contributed to numerous high-value licensing outcomes worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
With a M.S. in electrical and electronics engineering, Kevin has extensive experience across foundational and frontier technologies. His expertise spans software and business methods, graphics processing and computer vision, analog and digital circuits, semiconductor architectures, network systems, encryption, compression, memory technologies, speech recognition, and wireless applications. He helps clients, especially those in AI, robotics, autonomous systems, and secure computing, build patent portfolios that strengthen competitive positioning, support fundraising, and create meaningful long-term business value.
Kevin frequently speaks at patent, technology, and legal conferences. He has also authored influential articles on building premier patent portfolios under budgetary constraints, the role of competitive intelligence in increasing patent value, and strategic foreign patent procurement practices.