About

I’ve always liked gadgets.  Other kids were programming computers while I was still playing with erector sets, however, so I’m fortunate I realized I’d be better off expressing myself in the kind of text humans read than in the kind machines read.  I also realized I’m as interested in the ways technology affects business and society as I am in the machines themselves, so it makes a certain amount of sense that I’ve spent most of the past 20 years working as a corporate and intellectual property attorney mainly in the tech industry.

I joined the Boston office of Holland & Knight in 2006.  From early 2000 to late 2005, I was general counsel of Groove Networks, a software company founded by Ray Ozzie, who created Lotus Notes and is now Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect.  (Microsoft acquired Groove in 2005.)  I taught courses in negotiation, dispute resolution and constructive approaches to law practice at Harvard Law School for a few years before I joined Groove, and I practiced law with firms out west before that.  To replay things in chronological order: Having practiced out west for several years, I moved east for (more) grad school, the teaching gig followed that, Groove followed the teaching gig, then came my wife — and, well, that’s how a guy from Colorado ends up skating (aka “skiing”) down ice-covered hills in Vermont.  As a friend back home sometimes asks, “What’s the point of winter in New England, anyway?”  I wish I had a good answer.

In addition to my work as a lawyer, I’m a volunteer mentor with the MIT Venture Mentoring Service, vice chair of the Peace Appeal Foundation, and a member of the Economic Development Committee of the Town of Sharon, Massachusetts, where I live with my wife, Esther, and our little guy, Ellis, who arrived in June 2005 and now rules the roost.