Melissa Brown

Email: abqpxo@r.postjobfree.com

Address: ***** **** **.*.*.

City: Woodinville

State: WA

Zip: 98072

Country: USA

Phone: 206-***-****

Skill Level: Experienced

Salary Range: $114,000

Primary Skills/Experience:

See Resume

Educational Background:

See Resume

Job History / Details:

MELISSA J. BROWN

Cell:206-***-**** Email: abqpxo@r.postjobfree.com

http://www.linkedin.com/in/melissajbrownmjb

SUMMARY

Sr. Paralegal/PMI Certified Project Management Professional.

Delivers business value through effective program management. Passionate for technology and understanding and enabling clients' business, strategy, and technologies. A strong communicator able to provide innovative solutions to complex business and technical issues. Adept to working in a fast-paced, time sensitive environment. Partners with a variety of personalities across a large number of diverse internal groups, teams, divisions, and cultures. Special expertise in database systems and online search tools.

Acted as an authorized agent of the company with the responsibility to commit company resources through contracts and agreements for various projects. Drafted and negotiated a wide range of custom and standard contracts and other legal documents, in close collaboration with clients and legal specialists around the world. Examples included inbound and outbound license agreements, services agreements, program agreements, strategic alliance agreements, sponsored research agreement collaboration agreements, and marketing agreements. Applied knowledge of both intellectual property law and software technology to provide creative and proactive counseling to the business on intellectual property licensing, commerce, marketing, privacy, open source, standards, and antitrust issues; software licensing and open source.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

REGNIER-BROWN PUBLISHING, Seattle, WA 2012-Present

Author and Publisher

Co-Author and Currently Publishing A Child's Book: The Wizzy Wood, Faerie Spirits' Guild To Advanced Potty Training

Website: www.wizzywood.com

WIMMER SOLUTIONS CORPORATION, Seattle, WA 2012 - 2012

PM-CS-Program Manager Non Tech 2

Consultant to Microsoft Corporation's Global Procurement Group. Responsible for maintaining, and managing program requirements, plans, timeline, issues, risks and challenges while supporting managers to drive program and related projects. Worked closely with program/process owners, stakeholders, and business partners to identify business change. Responsible for leading cross-organization project teams towards targeted and scheduled outcomes and engage with program/process owners, stakeholders and business partners as necessary to communicate project objectives, strategy, tactics, and ongoing process.

Specific Responsibilities:

* Management of procurement domain data in multiple procurement systems

* Manual synchronization of data between multiple systems

* Manage audit report of data sync

* Communicate with multiple systems stakeholders on data changes

* Tier 1 support for the Procurement data source system

* Transition of manual data management into automated data management

* Reporting and analysis of data configuration

* Training material documentation and training support of procurement systems

MICROSOFT CORPORATION, Redmond, WA 1998-2011

Project Manager, and Business Intelligence Analyst, and Sr. Paralegal within the Intellectual Property and Licensing (IP&L) Patent and Technology Licensing Practice (2008-2011)

Extensive management of Volume Licensing contract life cycles. Developed and issued request for information, quotations and proposals. Managed high levels of service and quality through request for Proposal/Information/Quote activities; defined vendor performance expectations and established, gathered and evaluated performance data and metrics. Procurement Agent: Envisioned and created solutions outside of standard procurement department process. Responsibility included design, development, testing, and thought leadership partnering with the finance, tax, and human resources divisions to maintain compliance. Drove Statement of Work (SOW) and contract drafting, pricing and contract negotiations.

Leveraged sourcing experience, though leadership, strategic thinking, solid organizational, communication, and negotiation skills to develop procurement strategies that minimize TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) while prioritizing stakeholder service and support across assigned spend categories. Partner with stakeholders to drive results that supported the licensing executives business objectives: drove valued added services, including: cost efficiency, process optimization, supplier performance, mitigation of contractual & compliance risk for Microsoft.

Other responsibilities include: preparing process updates; updating content for LCAWeb; CRM Reporting Tool and internal SharePoint site; providing feedback on procurement tool updates and legal review tools; and preparing materials for license executive training.

Notable Projects/Accomplishments:

Improved process to streamline responses to inquiries from the External IP&L Email Portal - allowing timely responses to 97% of inquiries. Analyzed, assessed, and reduced redundant activities which decreased employees needed to respond to inquiries from 3 to 1.

Managed and maintained a $35K operating budget and associated patent benchmarking analysis conducted by India offshoring companies. Successfully delivered quality business data within budget. Exceeded target goals by creating, drafting, reviewing, and negotiating license agreements.

Conducted research and collected a variety of intellectual property and business-related data to generate multimillion dollars in department revenue. Researched patent portfolio data, market trends data, product and sales information and royalty models using extensive diverse internet research databases such as Reuters Knowledge, Dow Jones, Thomson Innovation, LexisNexis, and CourtLink. Extensive work with Microsoft proprietary databases. Presented data in a clear and intuitive manner.

Maintained and improved tools for accurate financial forecast projections. Developed and managed a comprehensive CRM Reporting Tool, customized to improved department's ability to forecast and understand the rhythm of the business at any given time. Gathered information through stakeholder meetings and documented use cases scenarios to address functional requirements (technical details, data manipulation, processing and other specific functionality) as well as non-functional requirements (quality requirements - performance, security, and reliability), which imposed necessary constraints on the design and implementation.

System Analysis Lead: Created architectural framework for the External Microsoft Corporation Intellectual Property and Licensing Website as well as redesigned the Internal SharePoint Website. Successfully assessed business needs through deductive reasoning skills, reviewed organizational structure, gathered system requirements and translated organizational needs to create a viable system/website.

Senior Paralegal - Portfolio Manager (2006-2008)

Managed initial patent assessment to product groups within the Microsoft Business Division, Platforms & Services Division, and Entertainment and Devices Division.

Notable Projects/Accomplishments:

Worked directly with engineers, business development, program managers, marketing, and technology evangelists to analyze legal risks and devise creative solutions for business units.

Managed opportunities to grow Microsoft's patent portfolio including identifying and analyzing strategic Microsoft patent opportunities that relate to competitive objectives, products and technologies, standards specifications, and Microsoft technologies and products.

Extensive research by utilizing online domestic and foreign patent databases and tools and reviewing patent file histories.

Identified potential issues with patents, find solutions for problems identified and work closely with teams on timely resolutions. Synthesized and delivered findings and updates to teams.

Developed and coordinated the implementation of tools and processes to improve efficiencies in providing appropriate, high quality, intellectual property support services. Actively developed and managed performance using Key Performance Indicators (KPI).

Delivered management of patent applications from the prosecution phase through issuance with the United States Patent and Trademark office. Microsoft's ranking was elevated to top 10 US Patent issuers and recognized as number 1 by IEEE annual patent scorecard for quality as well as quantity in 2008.

Honored by Brad Smith with Legal and Corporate Affairs (LCA) 2010 Award for supporting key strategies including Intellectual Property and People Development with my creation and management of the Patent Paralegal Curriculum Series: Received June, 2008

Senior Paralegal - Portfolio Manager (2000-2006)

Microsoft Research (MSRLegal): In portfolio/program management capacity provided world class intellectual property advice to a large set of clients engaged in cutting edge research, university relations, special projects, and product incubation activities. Worked closely with internal stakeholders to develop, source and implement vendor solutions to meet the needs of the MSR product discipline teams and technology launch activities. Responsible for identifying, developing and implementing sourcing strategies for categories of spend within MSR Marketing. This included interfacing with all areas related to category management and global procurement, including business groups, finance, and vendor account management teams.

Notable Projects/Accomplishments:

Extracts business value from technologies to enhance valuable propositions to business units.

Spearheaded multi-year advisory support to 5 Microsoft Research labs in the US (Redmond & Bay Area) and abroad (UK, China) to streamline collaboration research efforts worldwide.

Developed specification and use case scenarios for Microsoft Research's Code Posting Tool (CPT). Drove, as system analysis lead, MSR object code posting web tool project from conception to launch, i.e. design phase through implementation phase of tool. Responsibility included design, development, testing, and partnering closely with Microsoft Research Web Support team. Managed approved uploads through CPT website portal.

System analysis lead to envision and create solutions outside of standard procurement department process. Responsibility included design, development, testing, and partnering with the tax and human resources divisions to maintain compliant yet specialized Consulting Letter Agreement; Consulting Agreement; and Sponsored Research Agreement.

Delivered training to clients and colleagues in a variety of mediums, including presentations to enhance their knowledge of intellectual property issues.

Conducted intellectual property due diligence in view of facilitating technology transfer to the various product groups at Microsoft to meet Enterprise and End User customers strategic and anticipated business needs.

Legal support included: preparation and/or negotiation of Master Agreements, SOWs and Amendments or Addenda and license agreements; review of high volume of MyOrder transactions/SOWs for legal compliance; provide legal and policy compliance advice to MSR clients.

Gold Star Award for outstanding work in drafting and sheparding an academic agreement between China and Taiwan: Received February, 2003.

Paralegal - Project Manager (1998-2000)

Responsible for providing internal client OEMSales Far East Account Managers, Microsoft Licensing, Inc. (MSLI) with analysis, drafting, editing, and training.

Notable Projects/Accomplishments:

Responsible as Program Manager for several multi-million dollar OEM contracts, including Royalty & Price List and Exhibit Packs, and marketing documents resulting in increased revenue.

Drove development and negotiation of several types of contractual agreements including Master Agreements, Statements of Work, and Change Requests. Responsible for identifying business requirements and then negotiating the resulting contractual agreements to support the developed sourcing strategies.

Ensured compliance with Microsoft policies of various international jurisdictions. Trained business groups on relevant legal issues, policies, and processes.

Generated revenue through management and complex coordination of Microsoft website of Delivery Service Partners (DSP) and System Building (SB) channel programs and websites.

EDUCATION & CERTIFICATIONS

Project Management Institute, Inc.

PMP Certification

University of Washington

Certification in Paralegal Studies

Certification in Systems Analysis and Design

Patent Bar Review

John Marshall School of Law Chicago, IL

California State University, Fresno

Bachelor of Arts Degree, Philosophy

Graduated Magna Cum Laude and with distinction

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