Future First Lady a Former IP Lawyer
03 December 2012
When Barack Obama moves into the White House January 21, he’ll be taking a former IP lawyer with him – not as a member of his cabinet, but as a member of his family.
Michelle Obama, who will take on the largely ceremonial role of First Lady, once worked in Sidley Austin’s technology, media and privacy law group.
“I loved her,” Mary Hutchings Reed, a former Sidley partner who left the firm in 1989 and is now of counsel at Winston & Strawn in Chicago, told the Washington Post. She told the newspaper she remembers Obama as a stylish dresser with a ready sense of humor, not cowed by the senior partners, a young woman with self-confidence who nevertheless was willing to admit what she did not know.
One of Obama’s main assignments at Sidley was to handle trademark protection for Barney, the eponymous purple dinosaur from the then-popular children’s television show. “She had very little experience in that area,” former colleague Andrew Goldstein told the Post, “but she latched onto it and did a very good job with it.” Goldstein is now a partner at Chicago-based Freeborn & Peters.
Much to the chagrin of IP lawyers, it’s doubtful that when Michelle Obama bends the new President’s ear, it will be about intellectual property: she left Sidley in 1991 and embarked on a career in non-profit and public work.
