Then & Now: In different ways, Lowry is an attorney on the run

Editor’s Note: The following story appeared in the May 23 issue of the Northwest Arkansas Business Journal. “Then & Now” is a profile of a past member of the Business Journal’s Forty Under 40 class.

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When she isn’t working, Fayetteville patent attorney Meredith Lowry, a partner at Wright Lindsey Jennings, is generally on the run.

As a hobby, Lowry travels the country participating in half-marathons. She’s at 23 states and counting and is on track to hit 26 by the end of the year.

A trip to Missoula, Mont., is Lowry’s next scheduled race on June 25.

Lowry also moves from one civic engagement to the next in Northwest Arkansas with regularity as a consummate community supporter and cheerleader. Her schedule has many entries, including networking, speaking engagements, fundraisers and board meetings.

In a recent interview, the married mother of three (ages 15, 12 and 9) said she embraces being part of the region’s busy pace and advocating for numerous causes.

“I think Arkansas and NWA can be at the top of everything,” she said. “We’ve seen great success in business, and I think that success could be shared throughout the community. So if I say we can do that, I need to help that along. That’s the way I feel, at least.”

Lowry’s love of Northwest Arkansas comes naturally — she grew up in Fayetteville. She earned a bachelor’s degree in English and a law degree from the University of Arkansas.

She said she pursued a career in the legal field to help people, specifically businesses. Lowry began her career at Fayetteville firm Keisling & Pieper PLC, and the company named her a partner in 2010. In October 2013, she joined another Fayetteville law office, Smith Hurst, to create and build the firm’s intellectual property practice group.

In 2014, the Northwest Arkansas Business Journal included Lowry in the magazine’s annual Forty Under 40 class. In the spring of the following year, Lowry took her practice to Wright Lindsey Jennings, a Little Rock-based firm with an office in Rogers.

She focuses her work on acquiring and licensing various aspects of intellectual property rights for companies working in the retail space, ranging from individual entrepreneurs to large companies.

“I help business owners and inventors obtain protection for inventions they are working on or products that are valuable to them,” she said. “They want to make sure they have the exclusive rights.”

One of Lowry’s notable cases was her work on the Broyles Act, named for former University of Arkansas football coach and athletic director Frank Broyles. Working on behalf of the Broyles family, Lowry drafted legislation creating publicity rights allowing public figures in Arkansas more control over how their likenesses are used. House Bill 1002, known as the Frank Broyles Publicity Rights Protection Act, cleared both the House and the Senate in May 2016, after Gov. Asa Hutchinson vetoed an earlier version of the bill in 2015.

Currently, Lowry’s caseload includes representing a business client in a 3,700-plaintiff tariff suit against the U.S. government and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative regarding Trump-era tariffs on $300 billion worth of Chinese products.

“It’s a little weird going through the president’s Twitter feed and citing them into court documents,” she joked.

Lowry actively supports the arts and technology communities through her involvement with Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Scott Family Amazeum and the Northwest Arkansas Technology Summit.

In 2018, she was named Young Woman of the Year at the 20th annual NWA Business Women’s Conference. In 2019, Lowry spearheaded Wright Lindsey Jennings’ Woman-Run program. The statewide initiative supports woman- and minority-owned businesses and entrepreneurs through networking, mentorship, education and resources.

Throughout Arkansas, Woman-Run hosts events that feature speakers on various topics relevant to them, networking and mentorship opportunities.

Lowry said the rise of live-streaming during the pandemic furthered Woman-Run’s outreach in Arkansas.

“We have brought in more community partners, and we’ve seen that many people are interested in supporting women in business,” she said. “There’s also an opportunity to fix a capital access problem, and we have moved that [needle] in the right direction.”

Lowry is a Leadership Arkansas and Leadership Fayetteville graduate and has been included in “The Best Lawyers in America” in Patent Law — a peer-reviewed survey — since 2018.

She’s a board member of the Greater Bentonville Area Chamber of Commerce and the Fayetteville City Board of Health.