Alan D. Wingfield is fond of describing the Internet as the new Wild West. Someone just might call the 42-year-old attorney the dot-com answer to Wyatt Earp.

Photo by Joe Mahoney

As a litigator specializing in intellectual property, a broad term that encompasses everything from patent licensing violations to trademark infringements, Wingfield has seen the underbelly of information technology’s brave new world. Three years ago, he wrestled Virginia’s Luck Stone Corp.’s Internet domain name from Dennis Toeppen, one of the country’s most notorious cyber squatters — Web entrepreneurs who buy up popular domain names and sell them back to the companies who want to use them. "There’s a lot of conduct going on out there which is basically tantamount to stealing," Wingfield says. "The Internet is a whole new area. The rules aren’t established, and it’s an opportunity for people to try and take advantage of the confusion."

Wingfield, a Lynchburg native who worked as a newspaper reporter and photographer before going to law school at Duke University, says businesses are increasingly conscious of protecting the value of their ideas in a global market. "That’s a big component of the increase in the interest in intellectual property, just the realization of the value of trademarks, the value of goodwill with customers, the value of their ideas and their willingness to invest money to protect those assets."

Although he focuses on intellectual property, Wingfield’s practice extends to financial institutions, trusts and estates. "There’s a huge transfer of wealth going on from generation to generation, from the World War II generation to the baby boomers," he says. It’s a growth area he likes. Unlike dealing with corporate and financial decision-makers, he can give advice to clients who have never dealt with the legal system before and who often are in the most difficult situations of their lives. "On almost every case, I say, ‘You don’t know how bad this is going to be, and I do. Why spend your twilight years in the middle of a fight with your family?’ "

Many of the intellectual property cases Wingfield litigates are shrouded in secrecy. But his approach to winning those cases is anything but. He is a methodically and visually organized attorney who uses maps, time lines and chronologies as part of his planning strategy. He never planned to focus on intellectual property law, but "it seemed like the profile of a good intellectual property case fit my skills. Very often there’s a complex fact pattern and it takes a lot of sorting the wheat from the chaff, mapping out the case, planning out the roads on the map to get where you need to be."

Ironically, he uses the same approach to his hobby of bird watching. He maps out what he wants to accomplish. "I plan my itinerary to maximize the chances of seeing those birds."

Wingfield’s single-minded determination impressed his Mays & Valentine mentor, James Roberts, when Wingfield first started working with him on cases in 1987. When Mays & Valentine merged with Troutman Sanders in January, Wingfield became the firm’s practice group leader. "Alan is a very bright guy," Roberts says. "He just does terrific work. You put him on a case and forget about it. He thinks about his work, and he thinks about his wife and children." His wife, Emily, is an assistant attorney general and he has two children, ages 5 and 9.

Wingfield is the first to argue it doesn’t take a computer geek to understand some of the technology ideas at stake in his cases. "Usually there’s some sort of idea you’re litigating over that’s interesting, either some kind of technology, a brand, a trademark, something other people know about," he says. "I can learn what I need to know about technology when I get a case. The technology itself might be relatively simple to understand; it’s the law that gets really complicated."