software

George R. Halsey counsels start-up companies and individuals in all aspects of technology licensing, marketing and distribution. As a former General Counsel of SunExpress, a subsidiary of Sun Microsystems, an Associate General Counsel of Sun Microsystems and Honeywell, Inc., he was a lead legal negotiator in technology acquisition, licensing, distribution, trans-national transactions and multi-party tax leveraged transactions including transactions in excess of $250 million. Elected chairperson of the Boston Bar Association, Computer Law and Internet Committee, he is a speaker on topics of intellectual property law and legal issues in the life cycle of technology products. He was a founding member of the American Committee for Interoperable Systems (ACIS) which influenced changes in US, European and Japanese copyright law culminating in international treaties promoted by the World Intellectual Property Organization portions of which are included in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. He was a member of the legal steering committee that launched the Infiniband Trade Association, (IBM, Sun, Dell, HP and Intel) that defined new standards for high bandwidth interoperable systems. In addition to technology legal matters, he has successfully resolved a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation, a European Commission anti-dumping claim of significant magnitude and a number of high level executive employment issues. Mr. Halsey started his legal career as a “first chair” trial and appellate lawyer on numerous civil and criminal jury trials and seven precedent setting appellate cases. A graduate of Harvard College, he earned his JD from the Boston University School of Law.

I have been practicing business, corporate and securities law for over 7 years — specializing in representing startups, emerging growth companies, venture capital firms and angel investors in the technology sector. I represent companies throughout all stages of development including corporation formation, venture capital financings and merger and acquisitions. I represented companies such Polycom, Autodesk, TopTier Software, Virage, Autoweb, Informatica, PeoplePC and Atmel Corporation. I also represented investment banks (such as Credit Suisse, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs), entrepreneurs, technology and emerging growth startups, venture capital firms and angel investors. After graduating from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall), I started my law practice in Palo Alto in the corporate and securities department at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. It was a great time of learning and developing the fundamental skills I needed to succeed as a corporate and securities attorney. I sincerely appreciated my time there learning from some great attorneys. The years at Wilson Sonsini were pretty eventful with the long hours and late nights while getting married and having two daughters. I have since moved down to Orange County to be closer to family and started Technology Capital Law Group in Newport Beach, California in 2006. Last year, my third (and last!) daughter joined our family.

I provide next half day turn-around for all contract support and my clients reach me by phone live 98% of the time and they receive a call back within 30 minutes for the other 2%. This type of support is very valuable to technology start-ups, especially during the phase in which they are building their distribution channels.