We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Karima Gulick. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Karima below.

Alright, Karima thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s start with a story that highlights an important way in which your brand diverges from the industry standard.

The legal industry is a very conservative industry and most attorneys do not want to deviate much from the norm. For Intellectual Property (IP) specifically, we have taken a wholesome and different approach than most other firms. As business owners and lawyers, we understand the business needs of our clients. We don’t believe in spending all your budget on intellectual property protection and not having anything left for marketing or other essential business needs. To that end, we love working closely with our clients to understand their “secret sauce”, their unique market positions and helping them build a strong IP portfolio through patents, trademarks and copyrights. This becomes a valuable asset and an important chess piece that they can monetize and leverage for funding and differentiating themselves from the competition.
Thanks to our mighty and interdisciplinary team, we are able to create a concierge level legal service for our clients.
We also have wholesome team and firm values that we stand by. We believe in putting care in our work, but also caring for each other within the team. We also love having fun at work, working together, exploring new music genres and diving into the unique background of each of our teammates. Last but not least, positivity is a really big value for us, we love to collaborate in a jovial environment.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I didn’t always set up to be a lawyer, or an intellectual property attorney. In a way, patent and trademark law found me. I spent eight years as an engineer in diverse areas of aviation and aerospace dealing with hardware, software design, and integration.

I started my career with the airlines as a reliability engineer troubleshooting and repairing various aircraft components.  I then worked as a propulsion engineer working on various aircraft engines.  Moving from the maintenance side of aerospace to the manufacturing side, I helped design Pilot Controls and Actuation systems for commercial airplanes. I later led teams of engineers in designing and integrating in-flight entertainment software and hardware for cabin systems.

After years of engineering, I was still missing the excitement I thought I would find in the engineering world. I was expecting revolutionary inventions and state of the art technology all the time, but that was far from reality. After joining the innovation council at our engineering company, I fell in love with the patent world, and being on the forefront of the latest and greatest.

The engineering experience has definitely help me become a patent attorney. I can deeply understand our clients’ innovations and also ensure that it would be extremely difficult for others to design around their patents, because I am doing for them as well as.

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

In a way, I lucked out because you can start an online legal practice with very little funding. I had a 3 month runway in savings to pay for my basic needs and bills, and $500 in the business account. I used that to create a website on Squarespace myself (it was brutal!), and sent notifications to everyone I knew to let them know that I had started my practice, and was taking on patent and trademark cases. Creating a Facebook page and inviting everyone I know, and doing the same with LinkedIn and email helped bring the first clients. I used a lot of the downtime to teach myself how to create an online presence. That was really valuable. My best advice to anyone starting a business would be to keep your overhead as low as possible. You don’t want to starve the business, but also making cut throat decisions from the beginning can help with longevity.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

Pivoting from engineering to law was not the easiest decision. In a way, even reconsidering my engineering career after having spent years of studying and a substantial financial amount on my education felt like a failure. I also knew that I had to do what was best for me, and finding a career more aligned with who I am. I am glad I took a chance on myself and pivoted. A failure for whom anyways?!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://innoventlaw.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thepatentlawyer
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karima-gulick-patent-lawyer/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/innoventlaw
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@thepatentlawyer