Today we’d like to introduce you to Adam Urbanczyk.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Adam. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
I grew up in the Metro-Detroit area and went to school in Pittsburgh (Carnegie Mellon).
The educational experience was humbling, as that institution comprises some very bright students and faculty. I managed to graduate with a B.S.M.E. and moved back home to work for defense contractor, General Dynamics, as a systems engineer. The job was very interesting and I was able to work with many great people, but being ~25 years old felt if I was going to make a move then was the time to do it. I resigned from GD and enrolled in law school at John Marshall Law School intending to become a patent attorney. I finished law school in 2009 while working for small firms in River North. I started AU LLC, in earnest, in 2012 and have grown the practice from a narrow copyright practice into an omnibus intellectual property practice focusing on patent and trademark evaluation, protection, and enforcement and commercial transactions. I’ve parlayed that professional legal experience into real estate service, consumer products, and meta search ventures.
Has it been a smooth road?
No. The decision to leave one career path and embark on a legal one comprised a ~six year swing, leaving me older than my professional contemporaries. Fortunately, I was able to earn relatively advanced experience through my clerking positions during law school. The Chicago area is inundated with attorneys, so specialization is a key advantage. My engineering background allowed me to sit for the patent registration exam which has enabled me to so-specialize in patent law. The legal services industry appears to be mimicking our demographics as there are more “large” firms, an ocean of small firms, and relatively few mid-sized firms. Not only is competition fierce, but software advancements continue capitalize on how data-driven certain legal practices areas are becoming.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the AU story. Tell us more about the business.
AU LLC is a legal services provider serving a national IP client base and, more broadly, Illinois, Michigan, and DC clients with regards to business formation, transactions, and dispute resolution matters. Typical clients are looking to commercialize a concept or product/service, and we assist them with identifying any protectable IP they may have, working to protect that IP, and helping them commercialize it. Because so much of commerce is electronic, we invariably internet transactional matters (e.g., EULA, or Terms of Service) and accordant data protection and information privacy considerations.
AU LLC KOLODEN, a separate series of AU LLC, operates Koloden.com, a unique meta search engine for nationwide secretary of state business registration searches. The tool is used in-house and is offered commercially and to state and federal government agencies.
How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
I expect that within 15 years, the roles trademark and patent prosecution attorneys have now will have mutated into analytic roles. Already much IP support work is outsourced, and before long semantic and visual search technologies will supplant even them. While AI, at the moment, remains more pop culturally-impressive than in-fact impressive, machine learning and other systems will before long be able to understand, evaluate, and takes steps (e.g., application processing) necessary to protect trademark and patent assets. So long as algorithms are routinely updated with jurisprudential parameters (e.g., not unlike Google updating is search algorithms), a patent or trademark prosecution attorney will be more of an administrator. In the event our software can litigate for us, humanity can just give up.
Contact Info:
- Address: AU LLC
564 W. Randolph St. 2nd Floor
Chicago, IL 60661 - Website: http://www.au-llc.com
- Phone: (312) 7815-7312
- Email: adamu@au-llc.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Au-LLC-437014396406910/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/aullc
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/au-llc-chicago-5
- Other: https://www.koloden.com
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