HLS student, Katy Yang ’12, represented Her Campus® Media, the #1 online magazine for college women, in trademark work leading to federal registration of several important marks for the rapidly growing online start-up. Her Campus has recently obtained a registered trademark for the mark “collegiette”® and in 2011 also obtained federal registrations for its “Her Campus”® name and logo. Her Campus was founded in September 2009 by three Harvard College students. The start-up was a winner of Harvard’s business plan competition, the i3 Innovation Challenge, in March 2009, and also among the winners of last year’s MassChallenge start-up competition. Her Campus now claims a readership at of over a half million monthly at over 200 colleges and describes itself as “a collegiette’s guide to life” (a “collegiette” is the start-up’s term for a Her Campus reader).
While working in the Transactional Law Clinics, Katy worked with entrepreneurial clients on several for profit and non-profit matters, including the work with Her Campus. The experience provided her with the opportunity to develop practice skills and experience in new substantive areas, all the time working with real clients. Katy commented on representing Her Campus, “The uniqueness of working with a student start-up and the opportunity to learn a new area of law while helping a client made this work especially meaningful. ” Katy’s work was supervised by Joe Hedal, an attorney and clinical instructor at TLC.