Anna A. Onley

Anna Onley is an associate and intellectual property lawyer with Foley & Lardner LLP, where her practice focuses on patent counseling. Ms. Onley’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, Ms. Onley 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 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); and
• Financial technologies (including blockchain-based technologies, mobile banking, and business methods), with a particular focus on drafting applications and Office Action responses to anticipate and/or address 35 U.S.C. § 101 issues.

Ms. Onley regularly provides instructions to foreign counsel in prosecuting foreign patent applications before the European Patent Office, Germany, India, and China. Additionally, Ms. Onley offers litigation support experience in consumer class action defense and telecommunications.

Ms. Onley holds a Project Management Professional® certification as well as technical certifications from IBM, Microsoft, and Epic Systems. Prior to attending law school, Ms. Onley worked as a systems engineer and systems engineering project manager in the healthcare industry. Ms. Onley 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, Ms. Onley was a patent extern at the United States Patent and Trademark Office in Alexandria, Virginia. Ms. Onley 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

Ms. Onley holds a J.D. from Chicago-Kent College of Law (2016), where she served as an editor of the Chicago-Kent Law Review and the Seventh Circuit Review (as part of an academic honors program) and earned a Certificate in Intellectual Property Law. She participated in a study abroad program at the University of Oslo, Norway, where she studied European intellectual property law, international arbitration, and competition law with a focus on single-market regulations within the European Union.

Ms. Onley also holds an M.A. in public policy with a concentration in technology management from Northwestern University (2007), where she earned a Master’s Thesis of the Year Award for her work on results-driven innovation management. Ms. Onley earned a B.S. in computer science from DePaul University, where she specialized in predictive analytics and databases. She received a Top of the Junior Class Award in recognition of having earned the highest GPA at DePaul’s School of Computing, Telecommunications and Information Systems and graduated summa cum laude (2005).

Community Engagement and Pro Bono Work

Ms. Onley 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, Ms. Onley 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, Ms. Onley 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

Ms. Onley’s publications include:

• “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)

Professional Memberships

Ms. Onley is a member of the Federal Bar Association, Illinois State Bar Association, and American Intellectual Property Law Association.

Admissions

Ms. Onley is admitted to practice in Illinois and before the United States Patent and Trademark Office.