High Tech Companies

High Tech Companies

For at least two decades, technology companies consistently have constituted a significant part of our active client base in Silicon Valley.

All technology companies have to start somewhere and, since our law firm is not scaled to do IPO work, there is necessarily a large overlap between this category and that of small to medium sized business owners. This means that we do not turn our noses up at the individual executive or engineer who desires to form a bare-bones start-up company (at least one of our clients that began over a decade ago in just such a fashion is today a leading software company with a market capitalization approaching a half billion dollars). Nor do we shun – indeed, we welcome – the founder or founding group that aims to self-finance a high-tech company to a credible level of sustained and profitable operations, whether ultimately seeking to be acquired by a larger company or not. In addition, however, we have represented (and continue to represent) a variety of more established and highly successful high-tech companies, some of which are leading providers in such fields as consumer electronics software, security software, fiber optics, networking, wireless devices, and the like.

With this history, we have developed substantial experience and expertise in a broad range of sophisticated high technology matters and transactions: in intellectual property protection (including trademark, copyright, and trade secret), in intellectual property licenses (software source code and otherwise), in complex distributorship and reseller arrangements, in OEM deals, in strategic alliances and partnerships, in angel, bridge, and other seed-stage funding arrangements, in preferred-stock funding rounds, and in the entire range of M&A work (whether the acquisition is by stock sale, asset sale, or merger).

In performing such work, our law firm has dealt in multiple instances with venture capital firms but always with the VCs on the other side of the table. Ours is not a law firm in which the lawyers have such close ties with investors that a lawyer’s de facto loyalties to such investors cloud or impair the loyalties properly owing to the start-up company itself or effectively result in betrayal of legitimate founder interests. Our most successful clients in the high-tech field have maintained long-term loyalties to our law firm because loyalty and integrity are critical parts of who we are as lawyers serving companies, founders, and entrepreneurs in the high-tech community. There are abiding values in law, and in life, that transcend mere expediency, short-term gain, or opportunism, and we place high emphasis upon such values. For this reason, and others, a broad range of company founders and high-tech entrepreneurs have chosen to work with us in areas for which we are equipped to serve them, whether their companies are at the bare seed-stage, at or near the pinnacle of success, or at any stage in between.