Anna Eckhoff

Anna spent fifteen years building and leading ventures before she practiced law. As Innovations Director at an NSF grant-funded accelerator foundation, she helped the organization leverage $5 million of federally funded research into $200 million of private investment and acquisitions of early-stage technology companies, and directed an online IP platform designed to promote and connect a portfolio of 22,000 innovations, research results, and patents connecting more than 10,000 businesses and universities. She then led instructional technology across a large school district and ultimately founded and ran Collaboratory, a STEM learning company that reached over 30,000 children and adults through classes, camps, workshops and community events. When she advises a client on a lease, a hire, or a vendor contract, it is ground she has walked herself.

Anna earned her J.D. magna cum laude from Texas A&M University School of Law, where she became a nationally competitive advocate. She was inducted into the Order of Barristers, named Preeminent Advocate by the Board of Advocates, took first place at the American Bar Association regional negotiation and mediation competitions, and received the Texas Mediator Credentialing Association's James W. Gibson Rising Star of Texas Award. She now coaches the negotiation, mediation, and ADR teams for the school's Advocacy Program. She also interned for the Honorable Karen Gren Scholer of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas and for the Honorable Ralph Swearingin, Jr. of the Tarrant County Justice Courts, where she led a collaboration between the law school's Entrepreneurship and Community Development Clinics and the justice courts to produce accessible, multilingual educational materials and videos explaining how to file and defend a suit in justice court and what to expect from mediation as an alternative path to trial.

Anna's clients have included creators and companies with something to protect including artists, musicians, authors, and entrepreneurs. She has counseled them on copyright, trademark, right of publicity, joint authorship, and music royalty matters; drafted copyright transfer, work-for-hire, band partnership, collaboration, and author agreements; and prepared and prosecuted federal trademark and copyright registrations. Years in education taught her how to make a complicated thing plain, and that is most of the job: she reads the road ahead for her clients and explains it in terms they can act on, so the law opens options instead of closing them. She consults for Texas Accountants and Lawyers for the Arts, connecting Texas creatives with pro bono legal and accounting help through clinics and workshops around the state. As a TEDx producer she spent years helping people sharpen ideas worth spreading; the work is the same now, just further downstream, turning a client's idea into a business that lasts.