I Am A Doer.

I am a doer. I firmly believe that nearly every person has the ability to change the world for the better. This per-sonal statement is about one example when I made a real difference in my workplace. Two years ago, I was hired as the first Brand Manager in the history of the Knights of Columbus. Even though I do not have an educational background or experience in brand management or intellectual property law, my prospective employer (the company’s general counsel) offered me my job because he not only believed that I could easily understand and analyze unfamiliar legal material but also, more importantly, because he believed that I am the type of person who would take the initiative to grow a newly-created position into a salient asset for the company.
One of the first opportunities I noticed for improvement centered on my company’s licensing policies (or lack thereof). At the time, my company lacked a process to review applications from vendors who desire to use our trademarks to sell Knights of Columbus merchandise to our 1.9 million members. As the company’s Brand Manager, I understood that we needed a way to harness the creative energies from potential vendors while fulfilling the company’s responsibility to maintain control of our trademarks. To provide context, the licensing practice at the time was to reject all licensing applica-tions. Of course, there is nothing legally wrong with this approach, but I recognized that this strategy is inopportune for a couple of