As a founding partner, Dan primarily counsels clients with respect to intellectual property (IP) matters, and is actively expanding his knowledge and experience into additional areas of practice including estate planning, probate and trust administration, and business formation and counsel. With respect to IP, Dan comes to Scott Williams Law having two decades of experience preparing and prosecuting highly technical patent applications in the computer hardware and software arts. Those applications (and many issued patents) span technical fields including hardware design, software architecture, user interfaces, telecommunications, signal processing, artificial intelligence (including machine learning), applications of information theory, database management, and many more. Dan is putting this experience and expertise to great use at Scott Williams Law, designing and building a tech stack that integrates various software platforms to leverage technology and increase efficiency at our firm, all with an eye toward promptly and conveniently delivering our top-notch work product to our clients.

Dan was born and raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and stayed in the Midwest for undergrad, earning a B.S.E. in Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan (Go Blue!) in 1998. He then attended Harvard Law School, where he earned his J.D. in 2001. Following law school, Dan returned to the Midwest to live and work in the Chicago area for more than 15 years before relocating to the Indianapolis area in 2018. He has worked at nearly all law-firm levels—from summer associate to associate to equity partner—among several nationally prominent general-practice firms, several nationally prominent IP boutiques, and a successful start-up IP boutique as well. Dan taught a patent-application-drafting course for several years at a well-respected continuing-legal-education (CLE) conference in Chicago. Between that varied professional experience and growing up in Grand Rapids as the third of eight kids, Dan’s natural inclination to want to connect with people has been well-honed to relate easily to people from all walks of life and of all ages.

Dan and his wife, Kelley, live in Carmel with their daughter, Molly, their two sons, Sam and Michael, and, last but certainly not least, their faithful and energetic labradoodle, Archie (who, as it turns out, is a lot more lab than poodle—he never got the memo that doodles are not supposed to shed!). In his spare time, Dan enjoys playing tennis and spending time with Kelley and the kids (and Archie). He is also an avid reader, pays close attention to national politics, reads Supreme Court opinions for fun, and completes the New York Times crossword puzzle daily. And of course, he is obsessed with Michigan football!

Dan is admitted to practice in Indiana and before the United States Patent and Trademark Office.