Directors' College 2018
Michelle K. Lee
Michelle K. Lee – Visiting Professor of Law, Stanford Law School; Former Director, U.S. Patent & Trademark Office and Former Undersecretary of Commerce for IP; Director, Alarm.com
Michelle K. Lee is a public company board member, former chief executive of a $3.4 billion organization, a digital transformation strategist, an MIT-trained engineer, a Silicon Valley veteran experienced in scaling fast-growing companies with disruptive technologies, and a foremost intellectual property expert. She has distinguished herself at the highest levels in technology, law, business and government and has spent most of her professional career advising some of the country’s most innovative companies. Ms. Lee also serves as a public company board of director for alarm.com (NASDAQ: ALRM), a leading provider of a cloud-based, software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution to secure and manage an Internet-of-Things connected home or business.
As the former, and most recent, Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), Ms. Lee served as the chief executive of one of the largest intellectual property offices in the world. Ms. Lee was appointed by the President and unanimously confirmed by the United States Senate. She led all aspects of a 13,000 person organization with an annual budget of over $3 billion including operations, finance, human resources, legal, governmental affairs, policy, communications, information technology (including cybersecurity preparedness) and outreach with the innovation communities around the world.
Ms. Lee was the principal advisor to the President, through the Secretary of Commerce, on domestic and international intellectual property policy matters, and is the first woman to serve as Director of the USPTO in the country’s 220+ year history.
Ms. Lee has deep experience advising high-growth, innovative companies with disruptive technologies and business models. Prior to joining the USPTO, Ms. Lee spent most of her career in the Silicon Valley in technology, business and law. Most recently, Ms. Lee was an executive at Google, serving as Deputy General Counsel. Prior to Google, Ms. Lee served as a partner at the Silicon Valley-based law firm of Fenwick & West LLP, where she advised a wide range of high-technology clients on technology licensing, intellectual property, litigation, corporate and mergers and acquisition matters.
Before building her legal career, Ms. Lee worked as a computer scientist at Hewlett-Packard Research Laboratories, as well as at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. She holds a B.S. and an M.S. in electrical engineering and computer science from M.I.T., as well as a J.D. from Stanford Law School, and wrote her graduate thesis on artificial intelligence at the M.I.T. AI Lab.
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