Michael Owen Sturm was born on November 8, 1943, in Fairbury, Nebraska, a small city in southeastern Nebraska. He was born during the Second World War, a period of rapid expansion in American industrial production and federal research.
His later education and career moved him from the Midwest to Washington, D.C., where he studied law, and then to Iowa, where his legal practice was based.
Sturm received a Bachelor of Science degree from Iowa State University in 1966. The institution began in 1858 as the Iowa Agricultural College and Model Farm, was renamed the Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts in 1898, and became Iowa State University in 1959, the name it carried when Sturm graduated. Its origins as a land-grant institution tied its curriculum to agriculture and the mechanical arts.
He later earned a Juris Doctor from the Catholic University of America in 1973. The university was founded in 1887 with the approval of Pope Leo XIII and is located in Washington, D.C. Its law department dated from 1895, when it was part of a School of Social Sciences, and a separate School of Law was established in 1897. The law school received accreditation from the American Bar Association in 1925.
During 1972 and 1973, Sturm was a member of the Catholic University Law Review. Founded in 1950 as the law school's flagship journal, the Review is run entirely by students, and membership on its staff is selective and by invitation.
Sturm's professional life began in federal and naval research service rather than in private practice. He worked as a patent examiner at the United States Patent and Trademark Office, where examiners review applications to determine whether inventions qualify for patents, and his assignments involved valve and fluid-handling patents. He then served as a patent advisor to the Office of Naval Research, which supports scientific research for the United States Navy, and to the Navy's Strategic Systems Project Office, which oversaw the Navy's strategic missile programs.
He entered private practice in the early 1970s with a firm that later became Sturm & Fix. The firm's current profile gives 1962 as its founding year, so its origins predate Sturm's entry into it. Sturm was admitted to the Virginia bar in 1973 and to the Iowa bar in 1974, and he was admitted to the United States District Courts for the Northern and Southern Districts of Iowa. He gained admission to the United States Supreme Court in 1977, and in 1982 he was admitted in Nebraska and before the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. That court, which hears patent appeals from across the country, was created in 1982 through the merger of two earlier appellate courts. He is also registered to practice before the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Sturm worked as a partner of Henderson & Sturm in Des Moines, the capital of Iowa and a center of its legal and financial community. His practice concentrated on patent, trademark, copyright and unfair competition law, together with federal trial work. In a trademark proceeding brought by Iowa State University concerning CYCLONE marks, the correspondence was directed to him in care of Henderson & Sturm, and the record includes entries from 1991 and 1992.
The firm later merged with Zarley Law Firm, P.L.C., and Sturm was announced as joining the combined practice as Of Counsel. The Zarley Law office is located in West Des Moines, Iowa.
The American Bar Association is a national voluntary organization of lawyers that works on legal education, professional standards and the administration of justice. State bar associations such as the Iowa State Bar Association organize lawyers within individual states, and the Iowa State Bar Association's published list of past presidents begins with terms in 1874 and 1875.
The Iowa Patent Law Association brought together practitioners of patent law in Iowa, and Sturm served as its president. His memberships across state and national bar organizations reflect admissions in Virginia, Iowa and Nebraska alongside his national intellectual property practice.
