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Nicole Morris

Director of TI:GER and Professor of Practice; Director of the Innovation and Legal Tech Initiative (ILTI)

Areas of Expertise

Intellectual Property Licensing, Intellectual Property Strategy, Patent Law, Patent Litigation & Prosecution


Courses

Fundamentals of Innovation I and II, Patent Litigation, Special Topics in Commercialization


Biography

Nicole N. Morris is a member of the faculty at Emory University School of Law. She is a professor of practice and director of the TI:GER program (Technological Innovation: Generating Economic Results), an innovative partnership between Emory and Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) that brings together graduate students in law, business, science and engineering to work on ways to take innovative ideas from the lab to the marketplace. As a professor of practice, her areas of expertise include patent law, patent litigation, patent prosecution, IP licensing, and strategy.

Prior to joining the Emory faculty, Morris was the former managing patent counsel at The Coca-Cola Company in Atlanta, Georgia. While at The Coca-Cola Company, Nicole was responsible for the development and implementation of the company’s global patent strategy and providing day-to-day advice & counseling to business stakeholders, including freedom-to-operate and competitive assessments and counseling concerning IP related agreements.

Morris has over ten years of experience practicing patent law in large and mid-sized law firms and has represented clients in patent and trademark litigation matters, as well as patent prosecution matters. Morris also worked as an engineer for six years with 3M and Eli Lilly and has over twenty years of experience working with consumer products and technology commercialization.

Professor Morris is a frequent speaker on patent law topics including patent prosecution, patent litigation, IP licensing, and the role of corporate counsel in patent transactions. She is also a member of the American Intellectual Property Law Association, Atlanta IP Inn of Court, Atlanta Bar Association, Georgia Lawyers for the Arts (Board Member), and serves as Treasurer of the Minority In-House Counsel Association. In 2013, Morris was awarded the 2013 Rising Star Corporate Counsel Award from the Atlanta Business Chronicle and featured in the August 2013 issue of Corporate Counsel magazine.

Morris is licensed to practice before the United States Patent and Trademark Office and is admitted to practice in the states of Georgia, Minnesota, Massachusetts, and in the District of Columbia. 

Education: JD, University of Minnesota; MS, Chemistry, University of Michigan; BS, Chemical Engineering, Northwestern University.