Samuel Byrne

Samuel's story

Sam grew up in Galway, Ireland, and spent his teenage years taking apart radios in his grandfather's repair shop on Shop Street. He studied computer science at Trinity College Dublin and moved to the United States in 2004 to work as an engineer at a Chicago fintech start-up, where he wrote the code for a payments system that was later copied, almost line for line, by a competitor.

Watching the company's lawyers struggle to explain the software to a judge convinced him that the field needed people who could do both. He went to law school at Loyola at night while still shipping code by day, and passed the patent bar the same year he graduated.

His defining matter was a 2017 trade-secret case for a two-person robotics company whose former contractor had walked out with their motion-control algorithms. Sam traced the code through version-control history, secured an injunction in eleven days, and the company now employs sixty people in Schaumburg. He joined Hale & Mercer in 2015 to start the IP practice from scratch.

Sam lives in Logan Square with his wife Nora, a documentary editor, and their daughter. He still commits code to open-source projects on weekends and says it keeps him honest about what his clients actually do.