Kristin Lamb – ŌURA

An in-house lawyer plays a pivotal role in a young company’s product launches and innovations, protecting and enabling its growth. By collaborating closely with product teams, the lawyer ensures that innovative ideas are developed within a framework of compliance, intellectual property protection and risk management. Their proactive involvement not only safeguards the company’s interests but also fosters an environment where creativity and compliance coexist, empowering the business with confidence.

Kristin Lamb | ŌURA | Associate General Counsel, VP of IP and Regulatory Compliance

For ŌURA, Kristin Lamb is one of the lawyers behind these efforts—and more—as the wellness technology company known for its smart ring takes the next step in its evolution.

“We didn’t have an IP attorney when I joined the company and didn’t have an established strategy. I got to build our process in my vision,” says Lamb, the company’s associate general counsel and head of IP.

The Oura Ring tracks and analyzes health metrics to provide insights into sleep, activity and overall well-being. Its sleek design and advanced sensors measure heart rate, temperature trends, movement and other physiological data, delivering personalized feedback through an intuitive mobile app. The product empowers users to understand their body’s signals, optimize recovery and make informed lifestyle choices.

For Lamb and the legal team, for a company with a bright future, their work is just getting started.

Building a culture

When Lamb joined ŌURA in early 2021, she stepped into a company brimming with innovation but lacking a foundational strategy for protecting its groundbreaking work. At that time, the company didn’t have a dedicated IP attorney, and intellectual property considerations were an afterthought rather than a driving force behind the company’s operations. With no structured IP strategy, Lamb built the function from scratch, capturing and safeguarding the innovations fueling ŌURA’s rapid growth.

Lamb’s first step was to assess the company’s existing products and features, ensuring their unique elements were adequately protected. The Oura Ring was already gaining attention for its elegant design and advanced health metrics, but its features needed robust protection to maintain the company’s competitive edge. As ŌURA prepared to transition to its next-generation product, Lamb began laying the groundwork for protecting the future innovations that would define the company’s next chapter. This meant not just filing patents but developing a nuanced understanding of the engineering team’s workflow to determine the ideal time for submitting applications.

“You have to wait until the technology is solidified enough to write a patent application,” she explains. “If you draft too early, it might become irrelevant, but you also need to stay ahead of competitors.”

A few years ago, ŌURA was the only smart ring on the market, a solitary innovator in a niche yet unproven category. But the landscape soon changed after Lamb joined the company, and the arrival of major players like Samsung lent credibility to the space. The number of competitors skyrocketed, and now ŌURA tracks over 120 different smart rings, a dramatic shift from the early days when the company’s announcements could have been made at a coffee shop without much fanfare.

Lamb had to quickly adapt ŌURA’s IP strategy to address this new reality, balancing the need to protect ideas without prematurely revealing the company’s roadmap.

“Some companies are excellent at obscuring their IP before it’s ready,” Lamb says, an approach she has drawn inspiration from to ensure ŌURA’s strategy remains agile and forward-looking.

More responsibilities

Lamb’s role extends far beyond legal filings. She has worked tirelessly with her legal team to cultivate a culture of innovation across the company. Under her leadership, ŌURA has embraced initiatives like company-wide hack weeks, where employees from all departments collaborate on creative projects that sometimes lead to commercial products. One such idea, Oura Circles, was born during a hack week and has since become a key feature of the Oura App, allowing members to share their Sleep, Readiness, and Activity Scores with friends and family.

A dedicated Slack channel encourages a steady flow of ideas and rewards employees for their contributions with company swag, trophies and other recognition.

“Not all innovation has to end in a patent,” Lamb says. “We’re not at a point where we are turning away ideas and creations.”

One of Lamb’s proudest achievements so far has been guiding the growth of ŌURA’s IP portfolio to track its evolution from a startup focused on sleep insights to a leader in holistic health and wellness. The Oura Ring isn’t just a wearable device; it is a powerful tool that provides users with actionable health insights, from stress management to recovery optimization. By partnering with research institutions and healthcare organizations, ŌURA has expanded its influence beyond consumer wellness into areas like employee health programs and continuous glucose monitoring (a deal was recently struck between ŌURA and Dexcom to work on this).

Lamb has been instrumental in safeguarding these advancements while fostering collaboration with other innovators in the space.

“We welcome ideas that move the smart ring market forward,” Lamb says. “But we cannot allow copying because developing our product takes years of effort, resources and science.”

Ringing in a career

Lamb’s journey to her role at ŌURA was anything but conventional. Originally from Boulder, Colorado, she entered college at the University of Colorado with plans to pursue medical school, only to realize midway through her biochemistry degree program that medicine wasn’t her calling. Lab work, with its windowless rooms and yellow lights, further solidified her decision to pivot. An opportunity to author a patent application while working in a lab sparked her interest in intellectual property law. After earning her JD from the American University Washington College of Law, she followed the traditional path into Big Law, but over time, Lamb realized it wasn’t the right fit. Nearing the partnership stage, she boldly decided to move in-house, where she found her passion and truly came into her own as a lawyer.

“In-house turned out to be the perfect environment to apply the strengths and interests that had made me an outlier in private practice,” Lamb recalls. “I thrive in a role where I can steer strategy.”

Today, Lamb’s influence at ŌURA extends far beyond legal strategy. She has become a trusted advisor, helping the company navigate its rise from a niche startup to a market leader under constant scrutiny. Her understanding of the interplay between legal, marketing and engineering teams has been crucial to ŌURA’s ability to remain innovative while protecting its hard-earned intellectual property.

Lamb’s leadership has positioned ŌURA to thrive in a rapidly evolving industry, from ensuring employees test products discreetly to monitoring competitors’ every move. Her journey—marked by reinvention, resilience and an unrelenting drive to support innovation—reflects the very ethos of the company she helps steer.

“ŌURA is uniquely positioned as the leader and pioneer of the smart ring market, and I am proud to be able to lead our efforts to protect and grow the IP underlying that position,” Lamb says.