Announcing the Turner Boyd Women in Intellectual Property Pipeline Scholarship Fund

Turner Boyd has always been grounded in the desire to create and foster a community of strong patent litigators. As we have grown, it has also been a consistent goal of the firm to pave a career path for women who were driven to combine a love of the law and a deep interest in the sciences. After fourteen years, we are proud to say we are the largest intellectual property litigation boutique in the country founded and majority-owned by women. While this fact gives us an immense amount of pride, we can and will not limit ourselves to where we stand today. We aim to continue to source, hire, support, and promote the future talent of our field.This endeavor is not without challenges. While women make up 50% of all students graduating from law school, they are vastly underrepresented in IP law. Demonstrably, women make up just 12% of attorneys in cases before the Patent Trial and Appeals Board of the United States Patent and Trademark Office. One of the fundamental reasons for this delta is a pipeline problem: women continue to receive proportionally fewer STEM degrees than their male classmates, and a degree in a technical field is the first step leading to a practice in many types of IP law. These degrees create important building blocks to a successful career in our line of work.In an effort to shrink this gap and inspire more women to take this path, our partners Karen Boyd, Jennifer Seraphine, and Robert Kent have endowed, with $50,000, the Turner Boyd Women in Intellectual Property Pipeline Scholarship Fund at California State University at Northridge. The goal of the scholarship is to motivate and foster women in both fields—technology and the law—and help to reduce financial impediments to this goal. We specifically chose a State undergraduate school to target students with financial needs who would be significantly and positively impacted by the benefit a scholarship provides.We hope you are as excited as we are to encourage more young women to pursue IP litigation as a career. Applications for the scholarship have already begun to roll in. We look forward to announcing our inaugural recipient in the coming months.Thank you for your continued support and business.