Hill & Schumacher

About Hill & Schumacher

Hill & Schumacher is a small intellectual property firm on Avenue Road in midtown Toronto, serving clients around the world since 1994. It was started by registered patent agent Lynn Schumacher and by Nancy Hill, a lawyer, professional engineer and registered patent and trademark agent, and it still operates as a focused team rather than a large practice. The firm drafts and prosecutes patents, trademarks and industrial designs, and it has drafted more than 800 originating patent applications, along with hundreds of trademark filings in Canada and abroad. Its clients range from individual inventors and startups to universities, spanning industries such as medical devices, artificial intelligence, robotics, cleantech and software.

Schumacher earned a Ph.D. in chemical physics from the University of Toronto and worked as an industrial research fellow at the Ontario Hydro Research Division before becoming a registered patent agent in 1992. Hill trained first as a civil engineer, was called to the Ontario bar in 1988, and has practised intellectual property law since 1989. The firm's other registered agents bring similar technical depth: Stephane Levesque holds a Ph.D. in chemical and biomedical engineering and spent nearly a decade managing the University of Toronto's own patent portfolio before joining the firm, and Heather MacKeracher is a licensed trademark agent who also handles Canadian industrial design filings.