Andrea L. D'Ambra is counsel in Drinker Biddle's Commercial Litigation Practice Group and a member of the firm’s IP Litigation and Electronic Discovery & Data Management Teams.  Andrea joined the firm following a one-year clerkship with the Hon. Ronald L. Buckwalter of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.  She specializes in representing corporate clients in complex civil litigation with an emphasis on protecting intellectual property rights.

Intellectual Property Litigation. Andrea has a wealth of experience both prosecuting and defending patent infringement suits.  Recent engagements include representing the manufacturer and owner of a patent for a highly specialized heat sink and defending a software developer accused of infringement.  Andrea also works with clients to protect their copyrights through registration and enforcement actions. 

She currently represents a world famous photographer whose iconic images are frequently targets for infringement and misappropriation.  Andrea also has prosecuted and defended cases involving copyrighted software and training materials; design patents and trademarks for footwear, lighting fixtures and eyewear; and utility patents for CAD software and structural laminates.  She has practiced before the International Trade Commission and argued before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

E-Discovery. Throughout her legal career, Andrea developed and implemented cutting-edge technological solutions for addressing her client’s electronic discovery challenges. She recently assisted a client in a multi-billion dollar litigation migrate nearly 1 Terabyte of data to a more robust review platform with a less expensive vendor.  Andrea has helped clients overcome the challenges of reviewing and producing structured data from electronic databases, computer software from legacy operating systems, and mixed media from obsolete video and sound recording systems.  Leveraging her skills and experience with data-mining, Andrea recently helped a client negotiate a very favorable settlement after demonstrating the opposing party destroyed potentially relevant information well after it reasonably anticipated litigation.

Andrea counsels clients on preservation and data management issues, and has drafted e-discovery manuals for a number of multi-national companies.  In addition to counseling, she has assisted clients in navigating foreign data privacy laws while complying with U.S. discovery obligations.  Andrea also has presented and moderated for various Continuing Legal Education programs on patent, copyright and e-discovery issues, and has written on various e-discovery topics.

Andrea graduated from the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD in 1993, and served for over seven years as an officer in the U.S. Navy.  Her diverse Naval experience includes serving as an action officer for high profile investigations within the Bureau of Naval Personnel and managing the administrative and legal issues of the Navy's computer network defense command.  In 2000, she left the Navy to attend William & Mary School of Law where she served as a member of both the William & Mary Law Review and the William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal.  At graduation, her classmates and faculty awarded her the 2003 George Wythe Prize for dedicated and exemplary service to the law school community.