Clark Giles, '16, Returns to IU McKinney for LL.M. Intellectual Property Law Track
10/12/2020
Members of the IU McKinney community probably do a double-take when they see Clark Giles, with good reason. Giles was a student not that long ago, graduating cum laude from IU McKinney in 2016 with a graduate certificate in intellectual property law. He also worked on the IUPUI campus while in law school in various information technology capacities, including as an executive IT director during his last semester of law school and beyond.
Giles is back at IU McKinney, pursing a Master of Laws degree on the intellectual property law track. He has an eye on a Doctor of Juridical Science degree as well, meaning he’ll be a familiar face as he pursues his graduate studies. Giles is interested in privacy law as it relates to both municipal “smart cities” and “landlord surveillance” technologies. He also has an interest in the laws around the tokenization of real estate and high-end collectibles and selling these assets on the blockchain to accredited investors. He’s taken on graduate legal studies on top of his day jobs: Giles is chief technology officer for the City of Indianapolis and Marion County, and he owns and runs a boutique law practice on the Indianapolis east side that focuses on creatives and the business of intellectual property concerns around creative enterprises.
Information technology was Giles’ first endeavor after completing his undergraduate studies at IU Bloomington, where he majored in political science and English. The technical certificates Giles earned while he was in high school prepared him well for his early career path. Giles finished his undergraduate studies near the end of the ‘90s. That era was the beginning of the internet boom, a time when few people knew what the internet was or could foresee what it would become. His expertise and his communication skills made Giles valuable in the IT arena, and he enjoyed the challenges in his career. Yet he regretted not coming to law school, which had been his intention all along.
Giles completed two master’s degrees, in political science and English, at IUPUI while working for the university, and yet law school continued to beckon. “I thought that if I was ever going to go to law school and still have enough time left in my working career to truly master my chosen area of practice, I needed to do it sooner rather than later,” Giles said. “I resolved to finish my J.D. and become a lawyer before I turned 40. I took the Indiana bar exam the day before my 40th birthday and have been practicing law daily ever since.”
Upon completing his graduate studies, Giles hopes to find his way into the academy as a chief privacy officer or chief information security officer, while maintaining his legal consultancy through published research and participating in conferences.
“At my core, I am an academic. While I can appreciate every aspect of the practice of law, the parts that I enjoy the most are researching an emerging issue, developing a novel legal theory and educating the general public (or a particular industry group) on my practice area. I have always been more of a lecturer than a litigator,” Giles said. “I feel like I am a bit of a unicorn in that I have worked in a Director or C-Suite capacity for a Big Ten university, the private sector and for a major city. I am a lawyer who can also stand up a multi-million dollar enterprise data center who has the heart of a teacher. I am hoping to get back into an academic environment in a position that will allow me to leverage my research into a novel area of Intellectual Property law and my technical experience to do something impactful in the field.
