2021 speakers

Katharine Wolanyk is a Managing Director with responsibility for leading Burford’s Chicago office and its award-winning intellectual property and patent litigation finance business. Ms. Wolanyk is an industry leader in financing intellectual property and patent litigation.

Ms. Wolanyk writes and speaks frequently on intellectual property issues. She has been published in ABA Journal, Law360, IPWatchdog and IAM and has spoken at events including IPBC Global, EDTX Bench & Bar, American Intellectual Property Law Association, Center for American and International Law, University of Arizona and Chicago Bar Association.

Prior to joining Burford, Ms. Wolanyk was President, Chief Legal Officer and Founder of Soverain Software, an enterprise software company whose patent portfolio has been licensed extensively in the software and Internet retailing industries. Ms. Wolanyk also was intellectual property counsel to a publicly traded IT solutions firm, General Counsel of a managed hosting provider, Senior Vice President of corporate development at a publicly traded enterprise software company, a corporate attorney at Latham & Watkins, and a systems engineer at Hughes Aircraft Company, where she worked on the radar system for the stealth bomber.

Ms. Wolanyk graduated from the University of Chicago Law School and has a BS in engineering from Michigan State University.