Bianca Peachey

Bianca Peachey leads the patent practice along with other IP areas (trade secrets and domains) at Starbucks as director, senior counsel. Previously associate vice president, patents at L Brands, which owns Victoria’s Secret, Victoria Sport, Pink, Bath & Body Works, she also held IP consulting positions at Thomson Reuters and CPA Global, as well as law firm positions at Basck and Marks & Clerk.Her notable achievements include securing the first USDA Plant Variety Protection by a US company for coffee seeds and implementing inclusive strategies to identify valuable IP created by individuals historically under-included in the inventor pool. She organised and hosted the largest US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) inventor workshop for a single employer, with participation reaching the maximum allowable of 700 USPTO patent examiners. Peachey has led in-house defence groups against patent assertion entities in landmark cases. In Analytic Technologies v Starbucks, she exposed that the serial initiator of patent litigation did not own the patents in question and asserted counterclaims for inequitable conduct. In Cardtek v Starbucks, the case was dismissed by the plaintiff when Starbucks revealed that the plaintiff had conducted no investigation into how the technology worked. Peachey actively mentors junior IP attorneys and has used patents as an incentive to attract high-quality minority engineering talent at job fairs. Throughout her career, she has developed best practices for inclusiveness in the patent pipeline.