Curtis Wadsworth, J.D., Ph.D.
Founder and Principal Attorney
Doctor of Philosophy in Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, University of Pittsburgh
Juris Doctor, Duquesne School of Law
Attorney at Law — Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, ID No. 313223
Registered Patent Attorney — U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Reg. No. 57475
Founder, Nerd Lawyer Entrepreneur Services
Founder, DorothyAI
Hi, I’m Curt Wadworth, J.D., Ph.D.
I've been on both sides of the table.
I spent twenty years in law firm practice — patent prosecution, IP strategy, and corporate work for companies in biotechnology, medical devices, advanced materials, artificial intelligence, and software. I've built patent portfolios that survived diligence and I've torn apart portfolios that didn't.
AND, I built a company. DorothyAI is a patent search and analytics platform, and building it taught me things about how founders actually operate that no amount of client work does. Cap tables get messy fast. Nobody has time to read a forty-page MSA. The legal work that matters most is the work you do before you need it, which is exactly the work that feels least urgent.
That's why Nerd Lawyer exists.
Most law firms were designed to serve large corporations with slow decision cycles and large budgets. Founders don't have either. They need counsel who understands the technology, moves at their speed, and builds legal infrastructure that holds up when a buyer's lawyers start pulling on it.
I'm licensed in Pennsylvania and registered to practice before the United States Patent and Trademark Office. I hold a J.D. and a Ph.D. in molecular, cellular, and developmental biology focused on biochemistry and biophysics, which means I can read your provisional application and your Series A term sheet in the same afternoon and tell you which one is going to cause you problems.
Usually it's both.
Curt is based in Pittsburgh and is active in the regional founder and maker community. He writes Dispatch, a plain-language newsletter on legal strategy for founders.
Building Something?
Clean Start™ gets your entity formed, your founder equity papered, and your IP assigned — the three things that cause the most damage when they're wrong.
My Approach
Start with where you're going
Every engagement starts with the same question: where is this company going?
Not what document do you need. Not what's the deadline. Where are you going, who will eventually examine what we build, and what will they be looking for when they do.
That question changes almost everything downstream. Vesting schedules look different when a co-founder is part-time and might leave. IP assignment language looks different when half your engineering is contract labor. Customer contracts look different when your largest account is 60% of revenue and their procurement team knows it.
None of that shows up on an intake form. It shows up in conversation.
Take founder equity. The standard four-year vest with a one-year cliff is standard because it's usually right. But if one founder brought in the core technology and another is joining to build the go-to-market motion, identical vesting can quietly create a problem that surfaces two years later, at the worst time, with real money attached. The fix is cheap at formation and expensive afterward. It only gets found if someone asks.
I'd rather ask now.
You are not going to get a document assembled from a form bank with your name substituted in. You're going to get legal infrastructure built for the company you're actually running and the one you're trying to become.