When I announced that I was opening my own law firm to the Wellesley online universe, alums connected me to my first clients. They were great clients! Counseling at the local small business center helped me gain momentum as well. The small business center never had an attorney in private practice regularly volunteer to be a counselor before. I'm proud to say that since I've started doing it, two other attorneys have joined on too.

At the small business center, I help prevent people who are trying to start businesses from getting embroiled in scams. I route them to credible resources for their businesses and legal needs. I link them to free legal services through the local law school's clinics.  I'm proud to say I've truly helped a lot of people not fall for scams--saving them from a lot of frustration and potential business failure. I am on a mission to make my city known as a really cool, warm, supportive, and innovative town where entrepreneurs would want to settle their businesses and ventures.

It’s exciting to be able to explain this fascinating and wonderfully empowering area of intellectual property law to someone else. Everyone has intellectual property, and it's something that one can bundle up in certain ways so that one can monetize their rights in it. It is thrilling when that becomes an option for the people I counsel. People come initially in and they seem kind of nervous to talk to me because I guess for a lot of people, attorneys are intimidating. But when they leave, usually, there's a sparkle in their eye and spring in their steps because they better understand their options.

I am one of the first patent attorneys in the world to work in the blockchain technology space! And all of that happened because I carved my own path as an intellectual property attorney, rather than be attached to any existing firm with institutional limitations. What I've found is that entrepreneurship is the greatest extension of a liberal arts education. And at Wellesley, so many parts of our brain are primed--there's the data analytical part that utilizes algorithmic thinking, but there's also the part that absorbs and evaluates matters that are largely unquantifiable--that artistic part that's in tune with linguistics, culture, history and evaluated through heuristics. As an entrepreneur, all mind muscles are being stimulated on a daily basis, if not hourly basis! It's so enriching and rewarding to be an entrepreneur with a Wellesley education.

Raina Haque ‘07, Intellectual Property Law Firm Founder and Social Entrepreneur