For the Love of IP and Cats

Editor's note: this is an updated story from the the Fall 2024 Chicago-Kent Magazine. To read the magazine in full, follow this link.

“I just love intellectual property,” says Jen Nacht ’21. “I love that my job is defending things that people have created. That’s something I will never get bored of.”

Nacht is an associate at Greer, Burns, & Crain, Ltd, where she primarily deals in trademark and copyright litigation and patent prosecution.  

Before she was a lawyer, though, Nacht studied chemical engineering.

“I was a very medium student, and by the time I graduated, I had already hated it,” she says of engineering. “I felt that the field was not welcoming toward women. I had to take computer programming, and in some of those classes, I was the only woman in a room, and I felt very isolated.”

She was finishing up her bachelor’s degree and mulling over what someone who wasn’t enamored with engineering could do with an engineering degree when a group of alumni visited one her courses to share what they were doing with their degrees.  

One alum was a patent agent, and he introduced Nacht to the world of IP law.

After graduation, Nacht got a job as a patent analyst for Cardinal Intellectual Property, an IP services company. She was there for two and a half years and loved it—so she decided to go to law school. 

“I entered law school as sort of a disgruntled engineer,” she says. “I did so much better in law school. I fit in, I graduated cum laude, I did law review, I did [the] Lefkowitz Moot Court [competition]. I felt much more at home there.”

Upon graduation, it wasn’t a straight shot to big law.  

Nacht first teamed up with fellow Chicago-Kent alum Ion C. Moraru to launch their own firm with the help of Chicago-Kent’s Independent Practice Initiative, formerly known as the Solo & Small Practice Incubator program, where she was paired with mentor Michele S Katz ’00, founding partner of the intellectual property law firm Advítam IP, LLC.

“I didn’t start my own firm until I was 12 years out,” says Katz. “I went through the associate, then partnership track, so I found it so interesting and impressive that someone would start their own law firm straight out of school.”

Katz describes Nacht as a “go-getter,” and finds it particularly impressive that one of the first cases Nacht took on at her firm was a pro bono case.

“To me, that’s giving up yourself and your skill at such an early stage,” says Katz. “I helped her through that, and I believe it was a win, too. That’s always very exciting, and I was happy to help her do that.”

Nacht represented the Freadom® Road Foundation in a trademark cancellation proceeding. The Freadom® Road Foundation is a nonprofit that is dedicated to stopping the cycle of intergenerational incarceration by providing books, resume workshops, and other educational and job skills programs for children in Chicago with incarcerated parents and to citizens re-entering society after a period of incarceration.

“I was listening to the founder and decided that I would help her, I will represent her, until I die. I need to help this mission,” says Nacht.

“I’m one of those people who believe in pro bono service, I think it should be a requirement,” she adds. “I think firms should be more active in having their associates do pro bono work. I think that’s just part of what being a lawyer is.”

To drum up web traffic for their firm, Nacht launched a blog on their firm’s website, where she broke down contemporary IP issues in a way that ordinary people can understand.  

Even though Nacht and her business partner decided to part ways after about a year and a half together, she found success in the blog and wanted to keep it going. So she launched the Curious Cat IP Blog a few months later.  

“I didn’t really think anything would come of it. I didn’t even think anyone read them, until one day I was contacted by the president of the Women’s Bar Association of Illinois,” says Nacht.

The Women’s Bar Association president had read a post Nacht had written about Taylor Swift, and she had reached out because the Lawyers for the Creative Arts and Women’s Bar Association were hosting a crossover, Taylor Swift-themed event.

They wanted Nacht to be one of the speakers at the event.  

Swift was of interest to IP law because her complete compendium of work was purchased by the new owner of her former record label. She then decided to re-record her entire discography in order to maintain control of her master recordings.

“Obviously, I would love nothing more than to talk about Taylor Swift and intellectual property,” Nacht remembers replying, adding: “Oh my God, this is my dream.”

Since then, Nacht has continued to write in her spare time. A research paper she wrote about the federal government’s right to “march-in” on patents gained with federal research grants was recently published in the Texas Intellectual Property Law Journal. The Lawyers for the Creative Arts invited her to present her post about copyrights and tattoos in an upcoming event on February 26, 2025.

It may seem like a long time ago that Nacht was studying engineering in a room full of men, but she’s never forgotten the alum who told her about the possibility of being a patent agent.

Every year since, Nacht returns and schools the newest batch of engineering students about the world of IP law.

“I’ve been doing it for seven years now,” she says. “It’s funny, though, because every year I do it, there are more and more women in the room, and my story sounds so obsolete because more women are going into STEM, which is fantastic.”