Our Clients
High Tech Companies
For the past decade, technology companies consistently have constituted
over two-thirds of our active client base.
All technology companies have to start somewhere and, since our
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) up to about the $50 million range in valuation.
In performing such work, our 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 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 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.
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