NIH Patent Legal Services

The National Institutes of Health's Office of the Director awarded NIH Patent Legal Services, a multiple-award Master IDIQ for patent prosecution and related intellectual property legal services across four technology categories (Biotechnology, Chemistry, Mechanical Engineering, and Software), with orders accepted through April 19, 2027. No set-aside was used at the vehicle level or on any of the 692 task orders. The NIH Office of Logistics and Acquisition Operations in Rockville, Maryland is the contracting office. The vehicle was awarded April 20, 2020, and 5 months 2 weeks of ordering authority remain. The solicitation states that incumbents were performing under expiring contracts, and no successor vehicle appears in the source.

Ordering is steady but uneven, with 95 orders in 2022, 53 in 2023, 122 in 2024, 79 in 2025, and 4 in 2026 to date. Task orders have obligated $59.4 million of $59.5 million in combined potential value (100%). The solicitation advertised a combined ceiling exceeding $520 million over ten years, a figure far above the $59.5 million task-order potential value recorded to date.

Awarded orders cover provisional, PCT, national-stage, and European filings, office action responses, conflict-of-interest checks, and prior-art searches tied to individual inventions.

Klarquist Sparkman, LLP (335 orders, $20.8 million) and Leydig, Voit & Mayer, LTD. (159 orders, $25.4 million) hold roughly 71% of orders and roughly 78% of combined potential value. Cantor Colburn LLP (56 orders) and McDonnell Boehnen Hulbert & Berghoff LLP (28 orders, $5.1 million) follow, with a long tail of ten other firms.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases places 331 orders, roughly 48% of the total. The National Heart Lung and Blood Institute places 148 orders, and the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences places 73. Those three account for most activity.

Recent orders obligate roughly $10,000 to $20,000 each, priced on firm-fixed-price or time-and-materials bases, with performance periods generally near one year. The largest order in the recent block is 75N98020D00049-75N93025F00207 at $87,794.00, awarded July 3, 2025 on a time-and-materials basis.

Pursuant to the Federal Technology Transfer Act (FTTA), the NIH established a significant technology transfer program that includes the management, patenting, and licensing of inventions with commercial potential originating from research conducted at said intramural research programs. The patent-related legal services NIH's needs in pursuing patent protection for some such inventions and may also include ancillary intellectual property related services.