The Obama administration's choice for Patent and Trademark Office director is expected to be announced in April now that the Senate has confirmed Gary Locke, the president's pick for Commerce secretary. If the right person is named to head the PTO, the appointment "may tip the scales to move patent reform legislation from a pending bill to enacted legislation, perhaps as early as this year," Foley & Lardner attorney Hal Wegner said in a Monday e-mail. So who is in the running for the top job at PTO? Sources say the following names are prominently in play:

• Q. Todd Dickinson: Dickinson ran the PTO under former President Bill Clinton and currently heads the American Intellectual Property Law Association. Before joining AIPLA in 2008, he was chief IP counsel for General Electric.
• Jim Pooley: Pooley is a partner in the litigation department of the Palo Alto office of Morrison & Forrester and has practiced in Silicon Valley since 1973. He is immediate past president of the AIPLA and president of the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
• David Kappos: Kappos is vice president and assistant general counsel for IP at IBM. He joined IBM in 1983 as a development engineer. He serves on the board of directors for the Intellectual Property Owners Association and is active in AIPLA.

Shortly after Election Day, CongressDaily pondered Dickinson, Pooley and some other possibilities. They included Eli Lilly general counsel Robert Armitage; 3M IP counsel Gary Griswold; patent attorney Ray Millien; and law professors Mark Lemley of Stanford and Arti Rai of Duke, a classmate of Obama's at Harvard Law School.