Micheletti Law Group, Ltd.

Focus and practice areas

Intellectual property work sits at the centre of this Glen Ellyn practice, which operates as part of Micheletti Law Group, Ltd. The firm handles patents, trademarks, copyrights, licensing and deal diligence. It describes itself as a boutique business and IP practice working with startups worldwide.

On the patent side, the firm prepares, files and prosecutes applications. Trademark work covers both federal and state registration. The firm also advises on copyrights and on contracts with employees and independent contractors, which is where ownership of created work usually gets settled.

Deal diligence rounds out the list. That means reviewing IP portfolios when a client is buying a portfolio or taking an investment.

What the practice areas involve

A short note on process, offered as general background and not as a claim about any particular matter. A US patent application goes to the USPTO, where an examiner reviews it against prior art and usually issues at least one office action. Prosecution is the back and forth that follows: amendments to the claims, arguments about what the prior art actually teaches, and sometimes an interview with the examiner. The timeline commonly runs years rather than months.

Federal trademark registration follows a different path. An application goes to the USPTO, gets examined, then publishes for opposition before registration. State registration covers a single state and moves faster, so it can suit a business trading in one place. Copyright registration with the US Copyright Office is quicker still, and it matters because registration is a precondition for suing on a US work.

Licensing and diligence are transactional. The documents in play are assignment records, licence agreements, chain of title for each asset, and any pending office actions that could change the value of what is being bought.

How the team is built

Three people appear on the firm's site, with Randy Micheletti listed as President and Founder. He has been licensed before the US Patent and Trademark Office since 2003, which is a separate credential from a state bar licence. Patent prosecution requires it.

Micheletti earned his J.D. at Chicago-Kent School of Law in 2009. He is admitted in Illinois, before the USPTO, in the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, and before the United States Supreme Court. He also teaches upper-level courses at Chicago-Kent College of Law as an adjunct faculty member.

The gap between the 2003 USPTO licence and the 2009 law degree is worth reading carefully. Registration before the USPTO is open to people with a qualifying technical background, whether or not they hold a law degree, which is how patent agents practise. In my opinion, that sequence tells you the technical qualification came first and the legal one followed.

Of Counsel and support

Megha N. Patel holds the Of Counsel role. She took her bachelor's degree in Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and her J.D. at the Illinois Institute of Technology in 2016, along with a Master's in Intellectual Property Management and Markets. During law school she worked at a boutique IP firm on trademark portfolio management, copyright registrations and software litigation projects.

Lisa A. Zengou, M.D., joined in January 2023 and works on special projects and office administration. She is a physician. A medical qualification inside an IP office is unusual enough to be worth naming, given how much patent work touches life sciences and medical devices.

What the record shows

Randy Micheletti has represented technology clients for over a decade, according to the firm's own account. The USPTO registration dating to 2003 is the longest-running verifiable credential the site puts forward, and it is the one that matters most for the patent work the firm advertises.

The firm does not publish case results, client lists or settlement figures. For an IP practice that is unremarkable: patent prosecution outcomes are public in USPTO records but rarely presented as wins, and much transactional IP work is confidential by contract.

The adjunct teaching appointment is a checkable fact of a different kind. Law schools appoint adjunct faculty from practice, and the appointment is a form of peer assessment that does not come from the firm itself.

Who the work suits

The stated client base is startups, and the firm says it advises them worldwide from a base in the Chicago area. Startup IP work has a recognisable shape: filing early on core technology, clearing and registering a name, and getting the contract terms right so that code and designs made by contractors belong to the company.

Firm size matters here in a practical way. A three-person office means the person who takes the first call is likely to be the person who drafts the claims. Founders with a first patent application often want that, since explaining the invention twice is a cost of its own.

The firm offers flexible fee structures, including per-project and flat monthly arrangements. As a reviewer, the detail I would flag as useful is the monthly option, because early-stage companies budget by month and IP costs otherwise arrive in unpredictable lumps.

Reading the listing

Incubate IP is the trading name; Micheletti Law Group, Ltd. is the legal entity. Both appear across the site's pages, so the relationship is stated openly. Anyone checking Illinois records or USPTO registers should search the legal name.

The site names its people, gives their schools, graduation years and admissions, and says what each of them does. That level of disclosure is more than many small firms provide. Bar admission years for Micheletti and Patel are absent, and the site states no founding year.

The firm maintains Facebook, X and LinkedIn accounts. Its practice covers patents, trademarks, copyrights, licensing, deal diligence and business contracts, all from one Illinois office.

Commercial contract experience

Patel's work before Incubate IP adds a commercial contract strand to her intellectual property background. She negotiated and drafted commercial agreements, statements of work, amendments and non-disclosure agreements. Those document types place her experience inside the routine legal work that accompanies a business relationship once the main terms have been agreed.

Statements of work put the scope of a project into writing. Amendments record later changes without replacing the entire agreement. Non-disclosure agreements govern access to confidential material. Patel has worked directly on each form rather than encountering them solely through intellectual property filings.

Her earlier contract role also involved negotiation. That distinction matters because drafting records the agreed position, while negotiation requires attention to the terms each party will accept. The record therefore identifies both sides of her commercial contract work.

The Glen Ellyn office

The listed office is at 366 Pembroke Lane in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. The record identifies a single location and provides one telephone number, (312) 600-5412. It does not list branch offices or additional street addresses.

The office location places the practice outside central Chicago while the telephone number uses Chicago's 312 area code. The firm's materials describe its reach in regional terms, but the directory entry gives Glen Ellyn as the physical point of contact. Clients who need an in-person meeting should confirm the arrangements by telephone because the record supplies no office-hour information.

No languages other than English appear in the listing. That omission does not establish what languages the team can use; it means only that the directory record provides no separate language information for prospective clients.

A personal note on the founder

Micheletti's biography includes one detail outside his legal and teaching work. He plays trumpet in his spare time and performs with musical groups in the Chicago area. It is a modest biographical point, but it gives the listing a more personal account of the lawyer behind the Incubate IP name.