Burris Law owner and founder Kelly Burris was recently featured in Michigan Lawyers Weekly’s Sidebar Q&A series, highlighting her career as an intellectual property attorney, former aerospace engineer, licensed pilot, and law firm founder as Burris Law celebrates its 10-year anniversary.
Founded in Detroit in 2016, Burris Law has grown from a three-person startup into a globally recognized IP firm. Today, the firm has offices in Detroit and St. Louis and includes a team of 22 attorneys, agents, and staff serving more than 600 clients across the United States and internationally, including Fortune 50, Fortune 100, and Fortune 500 companies, mid-sized manufacturers, and individual inventors. Burris Law was recently recognized by Michigan Lawyers Weekly among the 2026 “Best Up & Coming Law Firms.”
“It’s hard to believe it’s been 10 years. It hasn’t been easy, especially through COVID. We go and see our clients a lot. We meet with them face-to-face; that’s just the way I’ve always done it,” Burris said in the interview. “Then when COVID hit, we couldn’t go out and see our clients. Getting through COVID, getting through challenges, getting the right people on the team — 10 years feels like a really big accomplishment in light of all the stuff that we were up against.”
The article explores how Kelly’s lifelong passion for aviation has shaped Burris Law’s distinctive “fly-to-client” approach. As a licensed pilot, Kelly flies her own Daher TBM 940 to client headquarters, manufacturing facilities, labs, and engineering teams to better understand the businesses and technologies behind their innovations. The former aeronautical engineer has logged more than 3,500 flight hours and crisscrossed the country to meet with inventors, executives, and engineers.
“Growing up in a family that had some military connections, we’d go to air shows a lot. I would build models with my dad. My dad was in the Navy, and he was an air traffic controller on a couple of different carriers. So, I was just always really interested in ships and airplanes,” Burris said. “I was in high school … when Sally Ride was an astronaut. That’s why I studied engineering and wanted to be a pilot.”
Burris added: “When I was studying at Western Michigan, we had a lot of classes at the airport and when I went out there, I was around airplanes. I just had this bug — like I want to get in one and fly one. I started taking lessons at Kalamazoo Airport when I was in college and I fell in love. I just love being up in the air.”
In the Q&A, Kelly also discussed how attending a Women in Aviation conference helped her see the many ways airplanes could be used in business. “I had a smaller plane before the one I have now. It was a Beechcraft Bonanza, and I bought that in 2000. [It] was my dream, to buy an airplane,” Burris said. “Becoming a patent attorney helped to make that dream possible.”
Burris purchased her current aircraft in August 2021 and continues to use it as an essential tool for client service and business development. “I fly it all over the place to see clients and to go to conferences,” Burris said. “It’s super advanced and very safe.”
In addition to discussing aviation and firm growth, Kelly shared her perspective on one of the biggest issues facing IP law: artificial intelligence. Kelly noted that AI tools are increasingly important for legal and back-office support, but firms and clients are still working to determine the right balance between efficiency, cost, quality, and human judgment.
“Trying to figure out the best path forward using AI tools is going to be our biggest challenge,” Burris said. “If you’re not using AI, you might be out of business in a few years, so we, like a lot of firms, are trying to figure this out.”
Over the past ten years, Burris Law has earned numerous accolades from legal, business, and industry publications, including Juristat’s “Top Patent Firms” in patent prosecution before the USPTO; Best Law Firms® Tier 1 in Detroit in Patent Law; “Top 10 Midsized Firms” in the Patent Bots® Patent Quality Rankings; “Best Women-Led Law Firms” by Michigan Lawyers Weekly; and a “Diversity-Focused Company” honoree by Corp! Magazine.