Firm Spotlight: Chris Jacobs
Where did you go to school; what did you study and how did you make your way into IP Law?
I went to Ohio State for mechanical engineering. I had a good co-op job working at a General Motors plant building air-conditioning compressors. When they announced a hiring freeze just before I graduated, a friend of the family who was a patent attorney at Procter & Gamble suggested I look into patent law. I didn’t know anything about patent law, but after talking to him about it I was intrigued by the idea of having early insights into new inventions. I stayed at Ohio State for law school, and it didn’t hurt that my future wife was already studying law at Ohio State!
Early career: What did you do; what brought you to Renner Otto?
I graduated in the middle of another business slowdown, and was living with my wife in Akron, where she was clerking for a federal judge. I had already taken the bar and was getting desperate, applying for jobs everywhere without luck. Renner Otto finally took a chance and hired me as a law clerk. Shortly after the announcement came that I had passed the bar, an associate in the mechanical group announced his departure and I was hired as his replacement.
In those days Renner Otto had an agreement with a firm in Osaka, Japan, to place a US attorney in the Japanese firm’s office year-round. So I got to live in Japan for three months in the summer of 1996 and went back for another six weeks in the summer of 1997. It was definitely a unique experience. I worked long hours during the week and used my weekends to travel around the country.
What do you think makes Renner Otto unique or a better place to work than the other competitors/firms?
Two things -- the training of young attorneys and the collaborative atmosphere. Partners really take the time to train young attorneys and give them real and varied experiences, while also focusing on the client’s business and how IP fits into that business rather than thinking about the IP as a goal itself. Even now I can walk into anyone’s office and ask a question about some point of law or procedure or even advice on word choice.
What do you love most about working in IP Law? Any particularly exciting clients or products you’ve worked on?
Like anyone in patent law, I enjoy learning about new technology and making the technical arguments that help inventors get a patent. But, perhaps surprising in a field dominated by engineers, what I love most about this job are the people. My colleagues are wonderful, and I’ve been fortunate to work with some really smart inventors. And I have been fortunate in my career to have met some really outstanding patent and trademark attorneys from all over the country and all over the world. While I started traveling to Japan, I now have a client who does a lot of business in Europe, and a few years ago I had the opportunity to sit in on a hearing at the German Surpreme Court in a patent infringement suit.
Life outside work: What are your hobbies? Where do you live? Family life? Tell us a little more about your personal life.
Outside of the office, I am active with the Boy Scouts as an Assistant Scoutmaster in a local troop and a merit badge counselor. I was never in scouting as a kid, but started working with the scouts when my sons were younger and continued on after they aged out of scouts. In the summer of 2021, I took a crew of eight boys to Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico for a 70-mile backpacking trek that was a real high point of my time with the scouts. And my colleagues at Renner were really great about pitching in as needed, since I was without cell phone coverage for ten days!
I’m also an amateur woodworker and live in a house that is over 100 years old, so I also have a never-ending supply of hands-on projects around the house.
My wife is now the Associate Dean and Professor at the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law at Cleveland State University, and an avid gardener and traveler. I have three kids who are now young adults, two boys who were in scouts and played a lot of ice hockey when they were younger, and a daughter who waited to take up ice hockey her senior year in high school and loved it. Spending all that time at the ice rink also led me to join a curling club (perhaps a foreseeable expansion of my interests!).