Zareefa B. Flener

Key Details

Zareefa is the founder and managing partner of FLENER IP & BUSINESS LAW, a WBE-Certified Women-Owned business, and has extensive experience managing international and domestic patent and trademark portfolios in a wide range of areas. She has also been highly successful in obtaining company goals in M&A and licensing transactions. Zareefa has brought her firm to prestige via membership in the highly selective National Association of Minority and Women Owned Law Firms (NAMWOLF). Prior to establishing FLENER IP & BUSINESS LAW, Zareefa practiced at a prestigious international intellectual property firm for almost ten years. She was voted in as the first female partner in one of the offices. Her dedication and responsiveness to her clients sets her apart from others and just one of the reasons for her honorable recognition and accolades from the international community. She is well regarded by her clients and her peers, worldwide, for her attention to, and assistance with, international patent portfolios rooted in biotech including stem cells, virology, immunology, biochemical processes, cell culture, and laboratory instrument related inventions, design, mechanical, and the medical device arts. She has been recognized in Managing Intellectual Property magazine as an IP Star and one of the Top 250 Women in IP, and as a Leading 2020 Cannabis Lawyer by High Times magazine. Zareefa received her Master of Science degree from Loyola University of Chicago, With Distinction, an accolade which had never before been awarded to a graduate student.  She was in the laboratory doing hands on research for almost ten years, research in two particularly explosive areas: HIV transmission and pathology, and mapping of the human genome. Her masters project, from Loyola University of Chicago, involved mapping of the distal short arm of human chromosome 21, from the rDNA to the telomere, and she graduated with High Distinction. She is well published in the field of HIV pathology in such journals as the American Journal of Pathology, Clinical Immunology, and the Journal of Clinical Investigation.