Silicon valley intellectual property law association

Kaye Scholer announced that it has hired a White & Case partner to head its new Silicon Valley office.William Sloan Coats’ practice focuses on intellectual property matters and trade secrets disputes for software, hardware, computer, electronics, entertainment and movie industries, Kaye Scholer says in a press release.Coats said in the release that Kaye Scholer is a great platform for his practice. “I was attracted by the firm’s commitment to opening in this market,” Coats said in the release. I am also impressed by Kaye Scholer’s understanding of the needs of Silicon Valley clients and its resources to support them.”Kaye Scholer’s new Silicon Valley office is operating out of a temporary location until a permanent one is chosen.In a statement provided to the ABA Journal, Bijal Vakil, executive partner of White & Case’s Palo Alto, Calif., office, said that he wishes Coats well and that the firm has promoted associates in its IP … [Read more...] about White & Case Partner to Head New Kaye Scholer Silicon Valley Office

Doctors are asked to take the Hippocratic oath. So why not ask players in the highly litigious high-tech sector to take a similar vow?That’s the thinking behind influential Silicon Valley venture capitalist Paul Graham, who is asking established technology companies to commit to their own version of the Hippocratic oath.Graham’s simple pledge, which states “No first use of software patents against companies with less than 25 people,” is based on the ongoing problem of having larger competitors snuffing out competition from startups by threatening them with lawsuits.Graham, who declined to be interviewed, wrote on his blog at paulgraham.com about the patent pledge: “One way of using patents that clearly does not encourage innovation is when established companies with bad products use patents to suppress small competitors with good products.”At least 30 companies have signed the pledge so far.Sachin Agarwal, CEO and founder of the video- and … [Read more...] about Taking the Pledge: Venture Capitalist Pushes Software Patent Pledge to Protect Small Companies

Kodak once enjoyed a virtual monopoly, controlling 90 percent of the film market and 85 percent of the camera market. However, as the lesson goes, the old-school company declared bankruptcy in 2012, and it sold most of its intellectual property to the likes of Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung and new-age others who had been more proactive in embracing digital photography. The 2016 Report on the State of the Legal Market (PDF) hypothesizes that, like Kodak, lawyers are reluctant to stray too far from the business model that has served them so well in the past.Not that law firms are looking at extinction. “Firms at the highest end of the market will always be sought out for critical bet-the-company work,” the study stresses. “But the range of activities that only [original emphasis] traditional law firms can undertake will continue to narrow as alternative service providers become more expansive in their capacities and as software development increases the automation … [Read more...] about Some law firms look outside law practice to avoid their ‘Kodak moment’

Venture capitalist Jason Mendelson, in a speech he gave last year, was not venturing much oral capital into the concept of investing in legal services.A corporate and securities-law attorney before he co-founded the Foundry Group, his venture capital firm, Mendelson told a conference he found it difficult to invest in companies serving law firms because, unlike regular enterprise customers, they don’t always act rationally when it comes to economics. He warned that most legal startups would fail due to the industry’s complications and barriers.Next up to speak was Colin Rule, the founder and chief operating officer at Modria, which bills itself online as “the world’s leading online dispute resolution experts.” And things changed.Mendelson says he was so impressed by Rule and by Modria’s emphasis in targeting an area of the law that wasn’t regulated by the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct or serviced by traditional law firms that he … [Read more...] about These venture capitalists skip law firms for legal services startups

As a third-year associate at Weil Gotshal & Manges, intellectual property attorney Okey Onyejekwe obviously isn’t afraid of hard work.But he’s taking on a much tougher challenge for the next three months, when he will be serving in Iraq with his Air Force Reserve unit, reports the Am Law Daily. A doctor as well as a lawyer, Onyejekwe is the battle surgeon for his unit.The firm has been extremely supportive of his reserve work, Onyejekwe says, and will continue to pay him his full salary while he is on leave, the legal publication notes. Meanwhile, despite the stresses of his military job, he is still going to keep an eye on his cases back in California, colleagues predict.“Being Okey, he wants to keep getting updates on the cases and other matters, so even if he’s picking bodies up off the ground in Fallujah, he’ll be checking his e-mail to make sure the interrogatories get filed on time,” says Edward Reines, an IP litigation partner who works … [Read more...] about Weil Gotshal IP Associate Takes On Much Tougher Job