The Other Way Around

Editor's note: this is a story from the the Fall 2025 Chicago-Kent Magazine. To read the magazine in full, follow this link.

“When I started [my firm] Incubate IP, if you typed in ‘patent law advice’ on YouTube, the only thing that was out there were videos of a guy standing at a podium talking for two hours,” says Randy Micheletti ’09. “Who’s watching that? I love this specialty, and I didn’t want to watch that.”

Micheletti started Incubate IP in 2017 after spending years watching startups struggle to properly protect their intellectual property. He spent four years at K&L Gates and four years at Perkins Coie LLP, so he knew how expensive it could be for young entrepreneurs to get started and how few of them could afford “big law” rates.

When Micheletti was a young associate, he met with a group of business owners who were looking for patent protection, and he still remembers the moment when he saw the young entrepreneurs scan the fancy office and realize that they couldn’t afford the firm’s rates.

“We could do great work for these guys,” Micheletti remembers thinking. “There’s no way that they can afford it, which was really crushing to me because it was a cool project and a great idea. These two eager students had a real shot at making something interesting. But they needed to figure out how to pay for it in the interim.”

Years after that interaction, Micheletti started Incubate IP in order to deliver top-notch, big law-quality IP legal protections at rates that startups can afford.

“We approach projects with an eye on not just our own profitability,” he says, ”which we help control by working out of our houses and not renting spaces and not subscribing to all the databases and really monitoring the overhead carefully, but we try to meet the client, meet the entrepreneur, meet the startup company where they are.”

One of the downsides of keeping such a close eye on the overhead is that there’s not a lot of room in Micheletti’s budget for training young attorneys.  

That’s where Chicago-Kent College of Law comes in. It’s where he does most of his recruiting.

“It’s really gut-wrenching to me to ask a client to pay twice for a piece of work product when it could have just been written well once,” says Micheletti. “When I hire someone from Chicago-Kent, I know that their baseline writing skills are, at a minimum, really really good.”

Micheletti says that writing skills are the most important skills an attorney can have, and Chicago-Kent’s five-semester writing requirement delivers lawyers who are ready to hit the ground running on day one.

“You don’t turn in something that’s unpolished, that’s not ready for primetime,” he says. “You don’t turn it in until it’s ready to go. I know that’s just the language we all speak as products of Chicago-Kent’s programs.”

Micheletti also teaches as an adjunct at Chicago-Kent. That’s where he met one of Incubate IP’s of counsel attorneys, Shelby Wilson ’24.

“He was a professor I had at Chicago-Kent, and then he kind of became like a mentor to me,” Wilson says. “He’s the most humble, sweetest man I’ve ever met.”

Shortly before her final semester at Chicago-Kent, Wilson broke her back in a skiing accident and was in the hospital for weeks. It threw off her expected career trajectory and made passing the bar and getting a job much more difficult.  

But Micheletti always saw her potential, and he hired her.

While Micheletti may not think of his firm as a training ground, Wilson certainly does.

“I do all of his copyright and trademark work,” she says. “It is the best learning environment I could ever ask for. Especially with me easing back into more of a higher-level, intense environment after my accident.”

Micheletti sees education as a part of his imperative as a lawyer. He speaks at high schools, colleges, and with innovation groups about the biggest mistakes that entrepreneurs make with their IP.

“I’ve been giving versions of that speech for eight years now, and I’ll give that speech until you bury me six feet under because it seems so important for startups and entrepreneurs to understand that pathway,” he says. “They’re still making expensive mistakes on it. I see it all the time and it’s heart-breaking.”

When Micheletti was still working downtown and had a bit more time on his hands, he clocked volunteer hours at Chicago Volunteer Legal Services’ minor guardianship program. He’s also worked with clients through Chicago-Kent’s pro bono Patent Hub.

“Volunteering every once in a while isn’t just some kind of soul-cleanser or feel-good moment,” he says. “It’s more of an obligation than an opportunity. We all should be doing that as attorneys.”

At the end of the day, Micheletti believes that if someone needs help, you help them. It’s a lesson he learned firsthand from his maternal grandparents—both born in rural Wisconsin to families barely scraping by. But they instilled in Micheletti a generous life of active service to their family and friends, even when resources were scarce.

“I view our role not just as advisers to the clients that are paying us a retainer at an hourly rate,” he says. “It’s also our duty as attorneys in the field to educate. It’s not just pay me and then my mouth will start to move. It should be the other way around.”