Coke Morgan Stewart

Coke Stewart is currently acting director of the USPTO. Stewart was sworn in just one minute after President Donald Trump took his oath of office on January 20, 2025. 

Prior to her current position, Stewart practised at O’Melveny & Myers, as senior counsel in the Intellectual Property and Technology group. 

Previously, she served as deputy attorney general for the Commonwealth of Virginia, supervising 150 attorneys and professionals in the areas of healthcare, education, and social services, and overseeing hundreds of active federal and state court cases and internal investigations.

Stewart is already familiar with the USPTO having worked there for ten years, from 2011 to 2021, as acting deputy under secretary and acting deputy director, acting chief of staff, counsel to the director, senior policy advisor, acting deputy solicitor, and associate solicitor.

In these roles, she defended agency decisions in federal court and advised multiple administrations on a wide array of legal and policy matters, from patent eligibility to drug pricing to artificial intelligence. 

She has also overseen administrative law cases, defending agency practices and procedures before district courts in Virginia and Columbia. 

In private practice, Stewart has represented both patent holders and accused infringers in infringement cases throughout the US. 

In one of her first patent cases, she successfully represented a small technology company in a patent litigation that resulted in the eighth-largest jury verdict in federal court that year and the then-largest patent infringement jury award in the Eastern District of Virginia.