About Me I am a partner at Collette, Erickson, Farmer & O’Neill LLP, a small law firm founded in 1973 by a pair of prominent San Francisco attorneys who left big firm life behind and struck out on their own. The firm currently employs ten attorneys whose practices encompass a wide variety of legal specialties, ranging from intellectual property and toxic torts on the one hand, mergers and acquisitions on another hand, antitrust and white collar criminal defense on yet another hand, and continuing from hand to hand with products liability, construction defect, real estate, securities regulation, tax, and unfair competition — all of which rests on the broad foundation of a general civil litigation and corporate practice. Though I occasionally joke that the firm does everything but divorce work, there is some truth to that, particularly given our role as general counsel to many of the firm’s longstanding clients.
My own practice has evolved significantly since my graduation from Northwestern in 1995. While my initial focus was on bank fraud and tax fraud in federal court, over the years that has slowly evolved to focus on fraud in all its aspects, and led me to trade secret misappropriation and the inevitable disputes between companies and their former employees regarding copyright and patent ownership. By virtue of being in the right place at the right time — the Bay Area in 2000 — I became involved in a series of intellectual property cases involving theft of trade secrets, parody as a defense to copyright infringement, and a novel application of the the unfair competition laws to internet search engine optimization. As I have became more exposed to various aspects of intellectual property law over the last decade, my practice has come to have a high-tech slant; even where the issues bear something in common with my original practice, it is now fraud tied to the question of whether software has been developed independently or not, and theft of ideas rather than of money.
My practice is not limited to intellectual property, however, and involves a number of different areas of law. For example, ten years ago I offered to lend a hand in an environmental case, which I have now had the pleasure of trying twice, and which is still active (and currently up on appeal). Another example — I recently defended a hedge fund and its principal in a self-dealing case brought by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. So while this particular blog is dedicated to intellectual property, and the subject is dear to me, other unrelated topics may appear on these pages from time to time, since in law — as in life — variety provides the spice that relieves us from monotony.
I am a commercial litigator and intellectual property lawyer in San Francisco. Although my practice encompasses a wide variety of business disputes, I have a particular fondness for, and am prone to wax philosophical on, the subjects of copyright and trademark infringement in music, literature, art, and film.
