
Meet Hazel's North American Sales Team

DONAL O'CONNELL
Founder of Chawton Innovation Services
Donal founded Chawton Innovation Services Limited, a company that offers consultancy in the areas of innovation and intellectual property management. Donal worked in the IP field for more than 20 years and is a former vice president of R&D and director of intellectual property at Nokia.
Donal and his team at Chawton created Hazel as an outgrowth of the company’s expanding slate of IP-related tools.
Chawton’s client base has included leading universities, a global IP service provider, a selection of major IP Firms, a global telecoms company, a compliance firm and some global chemical companies. There has also been a global food and beverages company, a global heavy engineering company, one of the big four financial services companies, plus a variety of SMEs.
Learn more about Chawton here.

TOM EWING
Founder of Avancept LLC
Tom is a commercial lawyer, registered patent attorney, and intellectual property counselor with more than 25 years of experience in the IP field. In his consulting practice, Tom routinely advises international organizations, government agencies, universities, law firms, multinational corporations and financial institutions. Tom has been recognized as one of the world’s best IP strategists by IAM Magazine annually since 2009.
Tom has been selected by Chawton to lead its North American sales efforts.
in his private practive, Tom counsels commercial entities of all sizes, as well as venture capital and private equity firms. Tom has represented a wide range of high technology companies during his career, Tom authored the World Intellectual Property Organization’s textbook and course materials for an international patent agent training program. The textbook has been translated into six languages and used in dozens of training courses by WIPO staff. Tom has personally trained patent agents from nearly 40 countries. He also authored a course for WIPO in intellectual property valuation and trained students in valuation from nearly 15 countries.
Tom coined the term “patent privateer” and has used the phrase in numerous academic and general publications. Please find a link to Tom’s academic publications here. He has lectured on intellectual property and commercial law at universities worldwide and co-taught courses in intellectual asset management and commercial law at the prestigious Chalmers University of Technology for the past decade.
Find out more about Tom here.