Kozma Patent Law

John P. Kozma brings to his patent practice first hand experience with a broad range of information technology applications. Following his graduation from law school at the University of South Carolina, he began his legal career in 1980 as a staff attorney for Grumman Corporation where his primary duties included patent prosecution in the electrical and mechanical arts. He returned to South Carolina in 1984 where he engaged in private practice. With an interest in the nascent field of personal computing, particularly in its application to law office automation, he wrote custom software to create and print legal forms and worked part time as a computer programming instructor. In 1986 he enrolled in graduate school at Tulane University, where he studied software requirements and natural language analysis. While in graduate school he did summer work as an Assistant Deputy Clerk at the US Bankruptcy Court for the District of South Carolina, assisting in the automation of the court docketing system. In 1992, he participated in the National Science Foundation Summer Institute in Japan, researching patents for the Nagayama Protein Array Project. He completed his PhD in 1993, writing his dissertation on automated analysis of object oriented software requirements. Following his graduation, Dr. Kozma returned to Japan as a Research Fellow for the Japan Information Center of Science and Technology. He received a patent for an improvement to his research host’s machine translation system.

After a brief business venture involving the provision of Internet connected public access computers, he accepted an appointment to the Math and Computer Science faculty at the Citadel. To allow web design students to create and access their own web pages, he set up a web server making use of emerging technologies for shared Internet connections. In 2000, he joined the Computer Science faculty at the College of Charleston. While carrying a full time teaching load, he gave invited lectures and authored peer reviewed papers on the use of technology in the classroom and current developments in intellectual property law. He also created and taught a dual undergraduate/graduate class in information technology law for computer science majors.

He continued to work as an adjunct computer science instructor while serving as Special Counsel for Barnwell Whaley Patterson & Helms, LLC. In 2005 he became certified as a home energy rater, and did numerous ratings as a volunteer for Habitat for Humanity. He served as Director of Research and Development for Energy Wise Solutions and taught computer programming and network security at ECPI. In 2010, he was elected as a Commissioner on the Charleston Soil & Water Conservation District Board, where he served till 2014.

1333 S. Edgewater Dr.
Charleston, SC 29407

email: patents@jkozma.com