Selena Kim

About Selena Kim

Selena Kim is a Toronto partner at Gowling WLG who works as both a lawyer and a patent agent. On any given file, Kim might be arguing a patent case in court, working on the IP side of a deal or shaping strategy for a client's whole IP portfolio. The practice reaches patents, trademarks, copyright and designs, and clients come from many industries, life sciences among them.

Kim was called to the Ontario bar in 2002, then registered as a Canadian patent agent in 2003 and in the U.S. a year later. The Law Society certified Kim in 2014 as a specialist in intellectual property law, covering patents, trademarks and copyright. Kim's courtroom work has run through every level of Canadian court, with inventions ranging from mechanical to electronic to chemical, and it's included a permanent injunction obtained for a patentee in a case over a patented process for making polymer pipes.

Science came first, though. Kim holds a B.Sc. with distinction from McMaster and an M.Sc. in molecular biology from York, finished in 1998, along with an LLB from the University of Victoria. In André Bédard's York lab, the research used chicken embryo fibroblasts to look at cell signalling and how genes are switched on, and Kim's lab years also took in genetics and pharmacology. That training still shapes the IP work today. As Kim tells it, you can't realistically teach yourself that kind of material once you're in practice.

Away from client files, Kim cares a lot about getting more women into leadership roles. In 2020, Kim was heading up GROW, the firm's women's networking and development group, chairing the Autism in Mind board and serving on the Journal of Intellectual Property's editorial board. That same year, Canadian Lawyer put Kim on its Top 25 Most Influential Lawyers list.