Team Nike!

• Author: Ashly I. Boesche
• Position: Ashly I. Boesche is a partner at Pattishall, McAuliffe, Newbury, Hilliard & Gerldson, LLC. Ashly focuses on intellectual property law. She can be reached at aboesche@pattishall.com.
• Pages: 37-39

Published in Landslide® magazine, Volume 10, Number 4, a publication of the ABA Section of Intellectual Property Law (ABA-IPL), ©2018 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved.

This information or any portion thereof may not be copied or disseminated in any form or by any means or stored in an electronic database or retrieval system without the express written consent of the American Bar Association.

Y ou can’t walk down the street without encountering

NIKE—one of the most famous brands in the world.

Four talented women are part of the team who protect its

brand: Margo Fowler, Chief IP Ofcer; Jaime Lemons, Global

Counsel, Trademark and Copyright; Kristen Downer, Assis-

tant General Counsel, Trademark and IP Director Asia Pacic/

Latin America; and Dinisa Folmar, Assistant General Counsel,

Trademark and Copyright.

Here’s what it’s like to be in their (Nike) shoes. These are

some of their personal experiences working for an iconic brand—

inspiration and advice from Nike IP Counsel that is sure to buoy

the spirits of other female lawyers entering the practice.

Part of our jobs as in-house coun-

sel is to make sure that we bring the

right stakeholders to the table from

the start. Part of that is knowing your

business and who needs to make the

decision that you can move forward

on. I try to facilitate and help every-

one at that table provide feedback in

a meaningful and constructive way.

—Kristen Downer

Team

Nike

!

By Ashly I. Boesche

Ashly I. Boesche is a partner at Pattishall, McAuliffe, Newbury,

Hilliard & Gerldson, LLC. Ashly focuses on intellectual property

law. She can be reached at aboesche@pattishall.com.

Be viewed as part of

the business, not just

as the lawyer

Counsel should be part of the

solution rather than a roadblock

in achieving company goals

I am a big believer in embedding [the IP team] within the business—both the

innovation and design communities and the marketing teams. We are one IP team,

with transactions, licenses, trademark, and patents all under one umbrella. We

manage policy to create an ecosystem where you can connect all of these dots, which

allows us to keep a tight communication ring internally. Everybody’s aware of and

keeping up with where the company is going—where technology is going—what the

challenges are. This allows us to be strategic and to address challenges early.

Every company has business initiatives where maybe one part of the business

is an advocate for it and another part of the business may not see the value in the

same way. Our IP team works with every group from innovation through product

development through marketing and brand, to counterfeiting and brand protection

on the tail end. Being horizontal naturally allows us to have an enterprise view. We

are able to stitch together groups when one wants to go in one direction that may

be different from another. We play the role of bringing it together and doing what is

best for the initiative and company as a whole.

—Margo Fowler

If I’m working with the basketball

business and they are talking about

an athlete, and using only a rst

name, I want to be someone who

knows exactly who they are talk-

ing about. Establishing yourself as

part of the team builds a threshold

of respect and a relationship where

legal is viewed as a valuable partner.

They know that whatever advice I

am going to give is something that’s

in the interest of the team, and not

from a pure legal lens.”

—Dinisa Folmar