Christopher Santone is a Design Patent Agent at McAndrews who focuses on design patent prosecution, international design protection, and design portfolio strategy. He was the first individual to pass the USPTO Design Patent Bar exam and is one of only a handful of registered design practitioners in the United States.

His decade of experience as an industrial designer informs his approach to design protection. He helps clients identify protectable features early in product development and understands how drawings, views, and claim scope should reflect the way a product is actually designed, manufactured, and sold. That perspective carries into his international work, where he coordinates design protection for clients through the Hague system and a network of foreign associates. This requires adapting a single design to the laws, formal requirements, and drawing standards of many jurisdictions.

Within the design law community, he serves on the AIPLA Design Rights Committee, where he co-chairs the International Practice & Policy Subcommittee, and on the AIPLA Committee for Patent Agents, where he helped create the committee’s POSITA podcast. He has presented on design patent prosecution for the National Association of Patent Practitioners, and Bloomberg Law profiled his path to the USPTO’s design patent bar.

Before joining McAndrews, Christopher served as Director of Industrial Design at ATLASON Studio, where he led a multidisciplinary team in creating innovative products for companies ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies. Under his leadership, the studio earned the prestigious 2023 Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Product Design. During his career, he has designed more than 100 consumer products, from furniture to electronics, and is named as a co-inventor on 19 design patents and one utility patent.

He is currently pursuing his J.D. in the evening division at New York Law School and previously served as a summer associate at McAndrews, gaining experience in trademark and patent litigation support. He earned his B.S. in Industrial Design, with honors, from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.