Volunteer Spotlight: Caroline Chicoine

Caroline Chicoine, Husch Blackwell, St. Louis, Missouri, USA

Caroline Chicoine, Of Counsel at Husch Blackwell in St. Louis, Missouri, USA, remembers the first time she was involved in an INTA committee: “It started back in the late 90s with the Internet Committee. That’s where INTA became a second family.”

The Internet Committee had only been around for a few years at the time and it seemed to be a good fit for Ms. Chicoine, whose background was in electrical engineering. She was involved in INTA’s efforts to represent brand owners within the nascent Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), including assisting with the formation of the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy in 1999.

“We literally brainstormed in the cafeteria at the University of Chile where the ICANN meeting was being held that year and walked out with a mandate to create a dispute resolution policy for domain names,” Ms. Chicoine recalled. “To be in the thick of this ICANN experiment, to be a part of that, was really fascinating.”

Now, more than two decades later, Ms. Chicoine is involved in another relatively new INTA initiative as the chair of the Research Advisory Council, where she and other Council members provide input to help the Association and outside vendors execute studies and surveys on a variety of topics.

For example, the Council worked on the recently released 2020 In-House Practitioners Benchmarking Report. The study helps in-house counsel manage their teams by addressing questions like, “What does a team look like? What does its compensation and benefit structure look like?” Ms. Chicoine explained.

A new Council initiative underway is a survey including young consumers. It follows the successful launch of the study, Gen Z Insights: Brands and Counterfeit Products. Published in May 2019, that study explores the relationship between young consumers and brands and their attitudes and perceptions of counterfeit products.

Ms. Chicoine is also a volunteer on the Brand Restrictions Committee.

At Husch Blackwell, most of Ms. Chicoine’s work focuses on trademark enforcement in the online world. She enjoys the transactional side of portfolio management, especially watching her clients’ businesses grow and helping them think through their next steps.

With her background in electrical engineering and a sister who practices patent law, Ms. Chicoine started her legal career in patents. Eventually, she shifted her focus solely to trademarks, which she said are “so much more fun than patents.”

Outside of work, Ms. Chicoine enjoys spending time with her daughter, a sophomore in college, and her son, a senior in high school, as she prepares to become an empty nester. They enjoy hiking, and, she noted, “we’re a big board game kind of family.”

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