Overview
Anna Onley is an associate and intellectual property lawyer with Foley & Lardner LLP, where her practice focuses on patent counseling. Anna’s engineering experience includes systems engineering in the fields of electronic privacy management solutions, financial systems, electronic medical records, and predictive analytics (decision support systems and bioinformatics).
As a registered patent attorney, Anna works with clients to identify and protect competitive subject matter. She has analyzed, drafted and prosecuted U.S. patent applications in the following technical fields:
- Advanced manufacturing (including 3D printing)
- Automotive technologies (including telematics, remote control systems and emissions control and aftertreatment systems)
- Biotechnology (including drug-device combination products, controlled drug delivery, and diagnostic methods)
- Electronic systems (including nanotechnology-based security devices, nano-optics and digital imaging)
- Financial technologies (including blockchain-based technologies, mobile banking, and business methods), with a particular focus on drafting applications and developing prosecution strategies to anticipate and/or address 35 U.S.C. § 101 issues.
- Internet-based media (including streaming media and content delivery systems)
- Machine learning systems and methods in a plurality of application areas, including network management, telematics, and financial systems
- Telecommunications
Anna holds a Project Management Professional® certification as well as technical certifications from IBM, Microsoft, and Epic Systems. Prior to attending law school, she worked as a systems engineer and systems engineering project manager in the healthcare industry. Anna also served on an academic medical center’s Institutional Review Board, which is responsible for oversight of human subjects' research (2006 – 2013), and on a software vendor’s research advisory council (2013).
While in law school, Anna was a patent extern at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in Alexandria, Virginia. She also worked as a legal fellow for the State of Illinois, where she handled matters related to information governance and the Freedom of Information Act.
Education
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Chicago-Kent College of Law (J.D., 2016)
- Editor, Chicago-Kent Law Review
- Editor, Seventh Circuit Review (as part of an academic honors program)
- Certificate in Intellectual Property Law
- Study abroad, University of Oslo, Norway
- Northwestern University (M.A., Public Policy with a Concentration in Technology Management, 2007)
- Master’s Thesis of the Year Award
- DePaul University (B.S., Computer Science, summa cum laude, 2005)
- Recipient, Top of the Junior Class Award for highest GPA at DePaul’s School of Computing, Telecommunications and Information
Community Engagement and Pro Bono Work
Anna volunteers with the Illinois Tech Global Leaders Program, which aims to inspire students to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
During her final year of law school, she worked as a Rule 711 law clerk at the Domestic Violence Legal Clinic in Chicago, where she helped victims of domestic violence obtain orders of protection and represented victims in divorce proceedings.
During her first year with the firm, Anna second-chaired a series of asylum trials in a complex case before the U.S. Immigration Court and helped secure a win for an LGBT couple who fled their country of origin to escape persecution.
Selected Publications
- “A Proposal for Eliminating Adjudicative Loopholes under Statutory Law of Trade Secrets in the Seventh Circuit,” 11 Seventh Circuit Rev. 333 (2016)
- “Limiting Downstream Effects of Patent Licensing Activity in Software and Electronics: An Argument for Alienability of Patent Licenses to Licensees' Business Successors,” 91 Chi.-Kent. L. Rev. 361 (2016)
Admissions
- Illinois
- U.S. Patent and Trademark Office