About Swift Water Law
We specialize in providing expert, strategic and cost-effective legal counsel and solutions across the entire IP spectrum of patents, trademarks, copyrights, and trade secrets. We also provide business counsel as well as technical design and development assistance.
Our clients are local, national, and international. They range from individual entrepreneurs and startups to small, medium, and large sized companies and organizations.
Meet Rick
Richard (“Rick”) Kosakowski is the founder and principal of Swift Water Law. Rick is a business-oriented attorney who brings a vast background and extensive work history in various legal, technical, and business areas to work for the benefit of his clients.
Over the course of Rick’s 30 plus years in the legal profession, as well as 10 years as a technician and engineer, he has developed valuable legal, business, and technical skills and knowledge, including working as an attorney in-house at various business units of United Technologies Corporation (“UTC”), and with both big and small law firms that specialized in IP law. This gives him the keen insight and skills regarding best practices for representing clients of all sizes.
For example, when Rick was a Partner at a large boutique IP law firm, he prepared and prosecuted a multitude of patent applications for IBM relating to various cutting-edge computer hardware and software technologies and applications.
Rick also helped a renowned golf club designer when he decided to become a solo entrepreneur by obtaining several patents on his inventions, securing funding for his startup company, and protecting the designer’s valuable IP through litigation.
After graduating with his first Associate Degree in 1978, Rick started his professional career as an Electronics Technician with the Pratt & Whitney Aircraft division of UTC. He took great pride in later being named Chief IP Counsel for Pratt & Whitney in 2002, where he led the IP legal function for the entire company.
Rick earned his other degrees going to school at night while working full time. He has been registered to practice before the United States Patent & Trademark Office since 1989 and has been admitted to practice as an attorney since 1990.
Rick’s entire legal and technical career has encompassed working with entrepreneurs and startup founders, as well as small companies and major corporations. His current focus is on working with entrepreneurs and startup founders and providing value for them. Rick finds great satisfaction in helping these risk takers to move an idea from its concept stage and develop it into a viable business.
Rick also volunteers as a mentor for entrepreneurs and startups with the Valley Venture Mentors and EforAll Holyoke startup accelerator business programs located in Western Massachusetts. He’s been a guest lecturer at the University of Connecticut School of Law, a guest judge at the Connecticut Invention Convention, and has given numerous presentations on all aspects of IP law to various organizations and companies.