Scott Christie is a trial lawyer who actively litigates all types of intellectual property, information technology and data privacy cases, as well as white collar criminal cases. He also counsels clients in and handles transactional matters involving legal issues in these and related areas.
Scott regularly litigates copyright, trademark, trade dress and patent infringement cases; trademark counterfeiting, trademark dilution, unfair competition, and deceptive commercial advertising matters; violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act; and claims involving misappropriation of trade secrets before U.S. courts and the International Trade Commission. Correspondingly, he helps clients with registration, valuation, licensing, assignment, sale and other transactional issues pertaining to copyrights, trademarks, patents, and trade secrets.
Scott performs audits to determine the nature and extent of online trademark infringement through unauthorized registration of Internet domain names, use of metatag keywords, and advertising through sponsored linking. He pursues arbitration and litigation against cybersquatters, typosquatters, and other online infringers. Scott also tracks down, identifies, and initiates legal proceedings against companies and individuals engaging in product counterfeiting and product diversion.
Scott provides counseling to companies on protecting the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of their proprietary business information and computer networks and on complying with information security and electronic privacy laws and regulations. He further assists companies in developing computer network incident response plans, providing guidance when these clients experience network security breaches and violations of network policies and procedures, conducting internal investigations of such breaches and violations, and litigating against those responsible for network intrusions.
Scott instructs companies on protecting personally identifiable information of customers and employees, investigates breaches of security of such information, provides guidance to such clients concerning their obligations in response such breaches of security, assists clients in satisfying these obligations, and defends companies sued for data security breaches.
Prior to joining McCarter & English, Scott served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey where he headed the Computer Hacking and Intellectual Property Section of that office.
He was lead prosecutor in a major undercover investigation targeting Shadowcrew, an international criminal organization of approximately 4,000 members dedicated to malicious computer hacking, Internet fraud schemes, credit card fraud, and identity theft that concluded with the filing of criminal charges against 27 senior Shadowcrew members in the U.S. and the arrest of six members in four foreign countries. Scott also successfully investigated and prosecuted numerous cases of Internet fraud, telecommunications fraud, dissemination of computer viruses, computer extortion, theft of electronic data, and malicious computer hacking as well as a wide variety of criminal copyright, trademark, and trade secret theft cases.