Parsons & Goltry: The Scottsdale Patent Firm Where the Partners Do Every Bit of the Work

Inside Parsons & Goltry, PLLC, the Scottsdale firm where two scientists-turned-attorneys have spent 30 years doing every bit of the work themselves — no junior associates, no templates, just two partners who speak the language of the engineers and inventors they represent.

Parsons & Goltry — At a Glance

Origin: Two Scientists Who Became Patent Attorneys

Robert Parsons and Michael Goltry both earned undergraduate degrees in the hard sciences — Parsons in biology, Goltry in chemistry — before becoming patent attorneys and joining forces in 1995. After law school, Goltry moved to Washington, D.C., to serve as a judicial law clerk for Chief Judge Frank Q. Nebeker of the U.S. Court of Veterans Appeals before returning to Arizona; he has been registered to practice before the USPTO since 1995. Both remain admitted to the State Bar of Arizona and registered to practice before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and Goltry additionally holds affiliate membership in the Idaho State Bar.

Practice Areas

The firm’s practice is prosecution-focused: preparing and prosecuting patent applications, registering trademarks, and securing copyrights, along with patent and trademark searches and portfolio strategy. Goltry has prepared and prosecuted applications across an unusually wide range of technical fields, including farming, communications, chemical, pharmaceutical, cosmetic, mechanical, electrical, electromechanical, computer, computer software, and semiconductor technologies. The firm deliberately staffs every matter with a partner directly — clients are never handed off to a junior associate.

Track Record

Patent prosecution results are individual to each application and generally aren’t published the way litigated court decisions are, so there’s no citable case table here. The firm’s public record instead runs through three decades of continuous client relationships — several client testimonials describe working with the firm for a decade or more — and its own account of overseeing the issuance of a substantial number of patents and trademarks since 1995.

Note: Past results, where applicable, do not guarantee a similar outcome in any future matter — patent and trademark applications are independently examined by the USPTO on their own merits.

Client Voice

One client, describing a 40-year engineering career, called Goltry the most professional and effective patent attorney he’d worked with, and said he’d been a client for more than 20 years. Another described Goltry reversing a USPTO denial after two years on the docket, securing an eventual patent grant. A third recounted the firm turning a self-filed provisional patent into issued U.S. and foreign applications, describing the resulting patent claims as unusually well-crafted and the firm’s fees as reasonable.

Community

Both partners are described in the firm’s own materials as avid fly-fishermen and outdoor enthusiasts — a detail that fits a firm whose self-described approach is long-standing, personal partnership with clients rather than high-volume, transactional filing work.

Recognition

Both partners hold registration to practice before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office — a federal credential requiring a separate examination (the “patent bar”) beyond ordinary state bar admission, and a genuine, checkable qualification specific to patent prosecution work. Arizona’s own Board of Legal Specialization does not certify intellectual property law as a specialty, so USPTO registration is the most directly relevant credential to look for in this field.

The Arizona Legal Backdrop

What follows is general legal information, not legal advice.

Patents, trademarks, and copyrights are almost entirely federal matters — governed by the Patent Act (35 U.S.C.), the Lanham Act (15 U.S.C. § 1051 et seq.) for trademarks, and the Copyright Act (17 U.S.C.) — so Arizona state statutes play a limited role in most of this firm’s work. The one significant exception is trade secrets, which Arizona protects independently under the Arizona Uniform Trade Secrets Act, A.R.S. § 44-401 et seq. — relevant to clients weighing patent protection (which requires public disclosure) against trade secret protection (which requires confidentiality) for a given innovation.

The Awesome Attorneys Assessment

Parsons & Goltry’s genuine strength is continuity and technical fluency: two scientifically-trained partners who personally handle every matter across three decades, with client relationships that in several documented cases have lasted 10 to 20-plus years — an unusual retention record in patent prosecution.

The honest caveat: this is a prosecution-only practice — obtaining and maintaining IP rights — not a litigation firm. Clients facing an active infringement dispute or needing to enforce IP rights in court will need separate litigation counsel; the two functions require different skill sets even within intellectual property law.

Methodology & Sourcing

This profile was researched in August 2026 from patentsavers.com (firm site, attorney bios, client testimonials), LeadIQ’s company profile, and the firm’s own “About” and “Firm Overview” pages. Parsons & Goltry, PLLC did not commission, review, or pay for this profile.

Publisher Disclosure & Independence Notice

This profile is an independent editorial article published by Awesome Attorneys. Awesome Attorneys does not endorse, recommend, or warrant any lawyer or law firm profiled on this site, and inclusion in this series is not paid placement.

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