Jessica Christine Lai is a New Zealand academic, and is a full professor at Victoria University of Wellington, specialising in the interaction of intellectual property rights and indigenous knowledge.

Lai is trained as a chemist, having completed a Master of Science in 2009 in chemistry with a thesis titled The Use of Nanostructured Calcium Silicate in Solar Cells at the Victoria University of Wellington.^[1] Lai completed her Doctor of Law in 2013 at the University of Lucerne, where she also conducted postdoctoral research.^[2][3] Lai was awarded a Swiss National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship to work at the Max-Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition in Munich.^[3] Lai then returned to New Zealand to join the faculty of the School of Accounting and Commercial Law at Victoria University of Wellington, rising to full professor.^[3]

Lai's research focuses on the interaction between Western intellectual property systems and indigenous knowledge, specifically Mātauranga Māori. She has investigated how the patenting system addresses problematic technologies such as a gene-related technology, and also examines law and feminism, knowledge theorisation and legal sociology. Lai has written publicly about issues such as country of origin labelling, the difference between a trade mark and a certification mark in regards to the 'Rainbow tick', and differences between men and women in STEM.^{[4][5][6][2][3]}

In 2018 Lai and colleague Susie Frankel were awarded a Marsden grant on "Mission Creep” in the Pharmaceutical Industry and its Impact on Innovation and Health. In 2021, Lai was awarded a Rutherford Discovery Fellowship for a project titled Patents and power: a critical analysis of knowledge governance.^[2]