Ronald S. Laurie, Chairman, Inflexion Point Group Managing Director, Inflexion Point Strategy, LLC, CIPO, Inflexion Point Analytics, LLC mobile: 650-814-5600 ronlaurie@ip-strategy.com
Ron Laurie has worked in Silicon Valley for over forty years, initially as a computer programmer and systems engineer, and then as an intellectual property lawyer. In 2004, he co-founded Inflexion Point Strategy, LLC, an intellectual property investment bank engaged in buying, selling and investing in strategic IP assets and IP-intensive businesses.
Prior to launching Inflexion Point, Ron was a founding partner of Skadden Arps' Palo Alto office where he chaired the firm's IP Strategy and Transactions Group for six years. He was also a founding partner of Weil Gotshal’s Silicon Valley office in 1991.
As a lawyer, Ron advised clients in the semiconductor, computer, software, communications, media and financial services industries on intellectual property strategy -- a subject which he has taught at Stanford and Boalt (UC-Berkeley) law schools -- with a primary focus on the strategic use of IP assets in complex business transactions including mergers and acquisitions, technology divestitures, joint ventures and strategic alliances. At Skadden, Ron led IP teams in some of the largest technology deals ever done, worth over $50 billion. Ron is a registered patent attorney and a substantial part of his law practice involved strategic planning, competitive analysis and commercial exploitation of patents on leading-edge software-based technologies such as encryption, biometrics, and Internet telephony. Ron wrote the Priceline “reverse auction” patent which was the first Internet business method patent to gain national attention when it issued in 1998.
Ron has advised major US and foreign computer and semiconductor companies in implementing reverse engineering and “clean room” design programs for the development of compatible software and chip products in order to minimize legal exposure for copyright and mask work infringement.
Ron was an IP litigator for ten years handling high-visibility patent, copyright, trade secret and trademark infringement cases in Federal and state courts, including representation of Hewlett Packard in its successful defense of the “look and feel” copyright infringement suit filed by Apple Computer against HP and Microsoft over the Macintosh user interface.
Ron has been an advisor to the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office, the U.S. Copyright Office, the Office of Technology Assessment of the U.S. Congress, the National Research Council, the National Academy of Science and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), a United Nations agency based in Geneva. He is on the Executive Council of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology and is a permanent faculty member of the World Law Institute. He is on the editorial boards of The Journal of Internet Law and The Computer Lawyer magazines and co-edited a two-volume treatise titled International Intellectual Property. He has been a Director of the Computer Law Association, and has served on the Executive Committees of the International Intellectual Property Association and the Intellectual Property Section of the State Bar of California. He has spoken on IP and computer law topics at conferences of lawyers, engineers, business executives, judges and government officials in the United States, Europe, Japan, Korea, Australia and Brazil.
Ron has been listed in virtually every survey of leading IP lawyers including Top 25 California IP Lawyers (Daily Journal), Best Lawyers in America (Woodward-White), America's Leading Business Lawyers (Chambers), Global Counsel 3000 (Practical Law Co.) and International Who's Who of Business Lawyers (Law Business Research).