Whatever the Weather

For Chief Legal Officer Jennifer Chung, who handles the AccuWeather app, IP portfolio, and data privacy policies as the fast-paced company’s general counsel, the learning never ends

By Bridgett Novak

Jennifer Chung recalls that when she was a student at the highly competitive Stuyvesant High School in New York City, “The entire focus was on getting into the best university.” But once she enrolled at Cornell University, she wasn’t sure what to do next.

Cornell pairs all freshmen with professors for academic and career guidance, and Chung was assigned to a chemistry professor. Based on their interactions, she decided to major in chemistry and Asian studies. As for her decision to pursue a legal career, she shadowed a litigator her junior year as part of Cornell’s alumni externship program, and “that cinched it,” she recalls. She thought that most law school students majored in English, political science, or philosophy, but the chemistry professor encouraged chemistry as her major to study something interesting and differentiate herself.

That turned out to be stellar advice. “I continued to be interested in IP work, and you need a science degree, or at least thirty-something science credits, to sit for the patent bar exam,” Chung explains.

Her first in-house position came in 2014, when she joined Time as assistant general counsel, managing the mass media corporation’s global trademark portfolio. When the legal department was wound down as part of the acquisition by Meredith, she accepted a job at AccuWeather as associate general counsel. One year later, her boss left the company, and she became general counsel and chief legal officer.

“This job is exciting and challenging. I’m dealing with different issues every day,” she says. She oversees three lawyers, a paralegal, and two contract managers, all of whom work in the company’s headquarters in State College, Pennsylvania. She also has a chief licensing officer, who is based in Oklahoma City. “There’s lots of severe weather in the Midwest, so we need to be on the ground,” she explains.

AccuWeather has several lines of business serving more than 1.5 billion people worldwide every day. In addition to a 24/7 national weather channel, it has a robust mobile app; provides forecasts to radio and television stations, newspapers, 180,000 third-party websites, and Amazon’s Alexa; has contracts with various government agencies; and produces forecasts and historical data for businesses around the world, including more than half of the Fortune 500 companies.

The company also has an extensive IP portfolio. “For example, we have patents on how we analyze data points and on the process for distributing weather alerts and other customer notifications, and we have several trademarks, including AccuWeather and minute-by-minute forecasts with proven Superior Accuracy,” she explains.

Chung says continuous learning is an essential part of her job. One area she is currently focusing on is data privacy. “It’s a rapidly evolving field, and we have to stay on top of it,” she says. “To