Investing in Others: Alumna鈥檚 Firm Gives to Encourage Interest in Intellectual Property Law ( 3546)

– – Investing in Others: Alumna鈥檚 Firm Gives to Encourage Interest in Intellectual Property Law

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<div id="attachment_51722" style="width: 650px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img class="wp-image-51722 size-full" src="; alt="Karen Boyd." width="640" height="800" srcset=" 240w, 640w" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px" />Karen Boyd.</div>
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快活林性息 alumna Karen Boyd聽鈥�90 (Environmental Biology)聽calls Turner Boyd LLP, the San Mateo firm she co-founded, 鈥渁 unicorn鈥� in the field of intellectual property law because it was founded, and is majority-owned, by women.
Boyd鈥檚 expertise makes her a sought-after speaker and panelist,聽providing her perspective on many topics, including attracting more people, especially women, into the profession.
Intellectual property laws protect the rights of creators and owners of inventions, writing, music, designs and other works. The four main areas of intellectual property law are trademarks, copyrights, patents and trade secrets. In the areas of patents and trade secrets, it鈥檚 helpful to have a bachelor’s or advanced degree in a technical field, such as聽science and engineering. For some activities, such as writing patents, that background is required.
Women make up 50% of graduates from law school, but represent just 22% of the people registered with the United States Patent and Trademark Office 鈥� a qualification required聽to write patents. The pipeline of candidates is limited in part because women are underrepresented in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) degree fields.
Boyd and her partners decided they wanted to do their part to change that. They created a scholarship at 快活林性息 to support those聽interested in the field of intellectual property law.
鈥淲e decided that we wanted to make investments in the career paths of other people,鈥� Boyd said.聽鈥淲e were talking a lot about wanting to bring women into this field and support them, and we wanted to put our money where our mouth is.鈥�
The Scholarship
The聽<a href="; target="_blank">Turner Boyd Women in Intellectual Property Pipeline Scholarship</a>聽is open to California State University, Northridge students who have completed 60 hours聽of university coursework聽and are pursuing a bachelor鈥檚 program in the College of Engineering and Computer Science or the College of Science and Mathematics.聽The deadline to apply is April 16.聽
The endowment was created from a $50,000 gift from Turner Boyd partners聽Boyd,聽Jennifer Seraphine and聽Robert Kent, as well as $30,000 in gifts from Boyd herself. The 快活林性息 Foundation matched $25,000 of Boyd’s giving as part of the 2022 Matador Match Challenge. Seraphine said her hope is to benefit the field by supporting many types of diversity, including assisting students with financial needs.
鈥淚 put myself through school, and I remember getting a modest scholarship that made a huge difference to me,鈥� said Seraphine, who graduated from Florida State University College of Law. 鈥淚t really alleviated so much stress for me at that time.鈥�聽
Boyd’s Career Path
快活林性息 was a natural place to make a difference, Boyd said 鈥� she knows firsthand how impactful the university is for its students. She was already a longtime supporter, even joining the 快活林性息 Foundation Board of Directors in 2022.
Her career illustrates the twists and turns a law student may take before finding their niche.
Boyd originally arrived at 快活林性息 with plans to go to medical school, but changed her mind and for a time pursued a career in academia.聽After getting her biology degree from 快活林性息 on an environmental biology track, she pursued a master鈥檚 degree in molecular biology at UCLA. There, she learned that law school was a potential path for someone with her technical expertise, and she started to reconsider if academic science was the route she wanted to take. A friend who was studying for the LSAT law school aptitude test convinced Boyd to take the test at the same time, mostly because she wanted Boyd there for moral support.聽Boyd鈥檚 scores were so good that she decided to apply to law school.
She used her time at UC Berkeley School of Law聽to further refine her career path. She had options: Her bachelor’s degree was good preparation for environmental law, but her master’s degree was good preparation for patent law. Boyd thought the patent law path was a little clearer, which appealed to her as the first of her two children was born at the beginning of her last year of law school.
After getting her law degree, she practiced law at Fish & Richardson, an intellectual property law firm, where she was a partner, and聽founded Turner Boyd in 2008.
She’s worked with clients including Fortune 100 companies and solo inventors in a wide range of technological fields, including聽pharmaceuticals, consumer electronics and medical devices.聽One client has patented a test that can detect cancer recurrence early in a person鈥檚 bloodstream. Boyd has represented this client as both a plaintiff and a defendant. The nuances of these patent disputes require an understanding of molecular biology and data science.
Boyd was originally attracted to intellectual property disputes because of their technical nature, thinking it would be less emotional than family law or criminal law. But it turned out that emotions play a part in any type of dispute.
鈥淟aw is an interesting field because it’s the way that we try to get human beings to deal with each other,鈥� Boyd said. 鈥淎nd so there’s this human component to it. It turns out that it’s still highly emotional.聽 That is something that I thought I was trying to avoid, and I’m glad I didn’t, because it’s something that makes the field interesting 27 years later.鈥�
The First Recipient
<div id="attachment_51754" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img class="size-medium wp-image-51754" src="; alt="Nataliia Mosheva. " width="300" height="295" srcset=" 300w, 651w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />Nataliia Mosheva.</div>
The first Turner Boyd scholarship at 快活林性息 was awarded in 2022 to聽Nataliia Mosheva,聽a biochemistry student who is currently studying for the聽LSAT, with plans to go to law school and sit for the patent bar exam. STEM fields appealed to Mosheva, whose mother is a mathematician and father is a physicist, because she has a natural curiosity and likes the idea of using research to create solutions. After moving with her parents from聽Rostov-on-Don, Russia,聽to Woodland Hills in 2017, she discovered that she could apply her STEM knowledge with a law degree to help people.
The $5,000 scholarship means a lot to Mosheva, who worked long hours to support her family as they worked to get a foothold in America. Those pressures have subsided a bit, but the cost of law school still causes her concern.
鈥淚t helps to encourage you to continue, it helps you to understand that there are people who are willing to help you overcome those challenges,鈥� she said.
An Ongoing Relationship
Turner Boyd plans to go beyond financial support to provide longtime mentorship for scholarship recipients, and the partners intend to make themselves available for advice years down the road.聽 They鈥檝e already set up Mosheva with informational interviews with a number of law firm and in-house intellectual property attorneys in their networks.
They know that well-timed support can boost students on their journey to a meaningful and rewarding career.
“We wanted to be able to make that kind of difference,” Boyd said.
To <a href="; target="_blank">contribute to the聽Turner Boyd Women in Intellectual Property Pipeline Scholarship Endowment</a>聽or create one of your own, please contact the 快活林性息 Office of Development at (818) 677-2786 or development@csun.edu.

Thu, 02/09/2023 - 16:13 Investing in Others: Alumna鈥檚 Firm Gives to Encourage Interest in Intellectual Property Law

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