Before becoming an attorney, I spent fourteen years as an intellectual property paralegal prosecuting U.S. and international patent, trademark, and copyright matters. That experience fundamentally shaped how I practice today. I learned that effective legal counsel isn’t measured by how complex it sounds—it’s measured by whether it gives clients the clarity and confidence to move their business forward.

For years, I assumed I’d spend my career as a paralegal. It wasn’t because I lacked interest in becoming a lawyer. Law school simply felt like an enormous financial and professional risk, especially after watching hundreds of talented graduates struggle to find jobs in the wake of the 2008 recession.

It wasn’t until one of my mentors (and all-time favorite humans)—the former Director of the Patent Cooperation Treaty at WIPO, Jay Erstling— asked me a question that completely changed how I thought about law school. There are always practical obstacles: tuition, time, the disruption to a life you’ve already built. Those are real considerations, but they aren’t necessarily reasons not to pursue something. The question Jay asked me was much simpler: What’s the real reason? If the answer had been, “I don’t believe I am capable of becoming a lawyer,” that would have been a genuine reason not to go. But if the reasons were that it would be expensive, difficult, or require sacrifice, then perhaps those weren’t reasons to say no—they were simply the costs of saying yes.

So, I took the LSAT in June and somehow began my 1L year two very short months later.

I continued working full-time while attending law school part-time alongside incredibly diverse classmates from literally all around the world, most of whom were also second-career professionals balancing full-time jobs, families, and law school—all during COVID. My cohort was extraordinary. We had active-duty service members, physicians, wedding planners, scientists, actuaries, psychologists, CPAs, correctional officers, business owners, paralegals—people from just about every walk of life imaginable.

Watching each of us approach the same legal problem through the lens of our own varied life experiences reinforced something I still believe today: there is no single “right” way to approach a problem. Legal questions are rarely just legal questions. They intersect with business priorities, evolving technology, and the practical realities clients face every day. The best legal advice comes from connecting those pieces.

As my time at law school progressed, I found myself increasingly drawn to the questions that existed at the intersection of legal disciplines, which, frankly, should not have been a surprise given that I’d loved making the connections between the laws of hundreds of countries to prosecute IP globally as a paralegal. That curiosity ultimately led me to write my law review note on the tensions between trade secret law and the then-new California Consumer Privacy Act. I wanted to understand how these things worked together and conflicted in practice.

I vividly remember doing research late one evening after work and feeling an overwhelming sense of joy. It was one of those rare moments of absolute clarity; I realized that what fascinated me wasn’t just learning individual areas of law. It was discovering how seemingly unrelated legal concepts fit together. Looking back, I suppose that should have been my first clue that I wasn’t destined to stay siloed to a single practice area.

That same curiosity followed me into practice. After graduation, I remained with the same Minneapolis firm where I'd worked throughout law school, this time as an attorney in its intellectual property practice. A few years later, I brought that experience to an Am Law 150 firm, where my practice continued to evolve alongside my clients' technologies.

The legal questions my clients brought to me rarely fit neatly into a single discipline. A trademark matter often raised website privacy considerations. A commercial transaction might involve intellectual property, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and data governance all at once. Rather than viewing those issues as separate practices, I viewed them as interconnected pieces of the same puzzle.

That philosophy continues to shape my practice today. Across AI governance, commercial transactions, privacy compliance, intellectual property, and litigation, my goal is the same: to connect the legal issues, understand the business objectives, and help clients navigate complexity with clarity.

I wouldn’t change the path it took to get here. Spending fourteen years solving clients’ problems before ever stepping into the role of attorney taught me to value practicality over complexity, collaboration over silos, and clarity over jargon. Those principles continue to guide every client engagement today.