Marra M. Clay, Merchant & Gould

A colleague observing Marra Clay’s progress as a young lawyer has described her as “the definition of Up & Coming.”

“Up, Up & Away” is more like it.

She’s in her third year at the vaunted intellectual-property firm Merchant & Gould, and by her third month there she was assisting the lead attorney at a trial.

Clay says her education, as a chemistry major in college, and her focus on intellectual property law at the University of Minnesota Law School, provided great preparation for the work she does.

As a student she served as an extern for U.S. District Court Judge John Tunheim. Now, she’s so well versed in the field that she’s an adjunct instructor in intellectual property law at the U.

Clay is passionate about IP law. “It’s powerful to work on a case for clients who have built their whole life on their inventions and achieved the American Dream, and to fight to protect them against theft of their creations.”

She handles cases involving inventors, marketing professionals and entrepreneurs; she challenges patent trolls, and negotiates settlements for clients in the fashion, tech, and chemical industries.

She’s a member of the firm’s pro bono committee, and she works as an advocate for the Children’s Law Center.

Before law school she won a Fulbright grant to teach English and coach girls sports in a small village in Malaysia. In law school she published an award-winning scholarly paper for the Minnesota Law Review.

“I love to write,” she says. She served as editor of the student newspaper at Whitman College, in Walla Walla, Washington. She also loves to exercise, partaking in triathlons and the Tour de Tonka 100-mile bike ride for charity.

Asked how she has achieved so much so quickly, Clay says, “I’ve had amazing mentors.”