Dawn-Marie Bey

Dawn-Marie Bey is a founder and partner of Bey & Cotropia PLLC, where her practice focuses on intellectual property counseling, patent prosecution and portfolio management, patent analysis, licensing, due diligence, and intellectual property issues arising from government-funded research and contracting. She has more than 30 years of combined government and private-practice experience and has represented clients ranging from emerging companies and individual inventors to Fortune 200 companies. Ms. Bey's patent practice spans a wide range of technologies, including artificial intelligence, software and computer architecture, cloud computing, semiconductors, optical systems, biomedical devices, communications, sensors, and other emerging technologies.

Before founding Bey & Cotropia in 2013, Ms. Bey was a partner at King & Spalding and previously practiced for more than eight years at Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton, where she developed and managed patent portfolios for major technology companies and advised on licensing, intellectual property due diligence, opinions, and litigation-related matters. She began her legal career as a patent examiner with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, examining applications involving optical modulators, lenses, liquid-crystal displays, lasers, and semiconductor technologies. Ms. Bey's technical background also includes plasma-physics research at the Naval Research Laboratory. She has substantial experience before the USPTO and Patent Trial and Appeal Board and is registered to practice before the USPTO.

Ms. Bey earned her JD from George Mason University with a concentration in intellectual property law and her BA in Physics, with a minor in Astronomy, from Franklin & Marshall College. She has written and presented on patent law, patentable subject matter, government-funded intellectual property, patent prosecution, and technology commercialization. Ms. Bey has served as a guest lecturer on intellectual property and commercialization at Georgetown University. Her professional recognitions include selection to The Best Lawyers in America, recognition as Best Lawyers’ Richmond Patent Law "Lawyer of the Year” in 2022 and 2024, selection as a Virginia Super Lawyer, and inclusion in Virginia Lawyers Weekly’s Influential Women Class of 2025.