About Jay P
Jay P Kesan combines technical training and legal training in a career that moves between laboratories, courtrooms and classrooms. He earned a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. He then completed a J.D. at Georgetown University Law Center in 1993.
His early professional years began in research. In 1989 he worked as a research scientist at IBM. That experience preceded his entry into the legal profession as a patent lawyer in 1993 at the former firm of Pennie & Edmonds, LLP. He spent time learning the mechanics of patent prosecution and technology transactions during those first years as an attorney.
Kesan clerked on the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in 1997 for Judge Patrick Higginbotham. The clerkship offered him a close view of appellate decision-making and exposure to complex legal writing. A year later he moved into academia. In 1998 he joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a professor and was named the H. Ross & Helen Workman Research Scholar. His academic role blended engineering and law and supported scholarship at the intersection of technology and legal doctrine.
Over the next decades his work shifted between advising technology firms and pursuing scholarly work. In 2010 he served as senior intellectual property advisor to Liberty Access Technologies. More recently, in 2020, he co-founded Palm Energy Systems and took on a strategic advisory role there. Those positions reflect a pattern: movement from scientific research to patent practice, then to teaching and industry advising.
Kesan’s background spans electrical engineering, patent practice, appellate experience and university scholarship. He has professional experience in patent prosecution and intellectual property advising, and he has applied that experience in both corporate and academic settings. His trajectory is marked by recurring themes—technology, patents and policy—rather than by a single institutional home.
He balances technical depth from a doctoral education with legal training from Georgetown. That combination informs both his classroom work and his private advisory roles. He has worked inside established corporations, in law practice and inside university research programs. He now divides his time among teaching, advising technology ventures and handling intellectual property matters, concentrating on intellectual property, technology policy and energy-related advisory work.
