Joel Riff
Joel has lectured and written extensively on a variety of legal issues and has conducted workshops on technology transactions for professional organizations (such as the Licensing Executives Society and the Intellectual Property Society) and continuing legal education providers (such as the Practicing Law Institute and the American Conference Institute), as well as for companies and law firms in Silicon Valley. A list of some of his presentations and articles is available at http://www.techtransactions.com/speaking_engagements_and_publications.php.
Throughout the past 20 years, Joel’s private practice has focused on licensing, online commerce, and other technology transactions in the course of representing many local startups and some of the world’s leading technology companies, including Acer, Apple Computer, ARM, Cadence Design Systems, Charles Schwab, Cisco Systems, Excite@Home, Friendster, Intel, Intuit, Matsushita Electric (Panasonic), Mercury Interactive, MIPS, Mozilla, Netscape, Oracle, Sharp, Sun Microsystems, Symantec, and Veritas Software.
Joel is currently Of Counsel to the Technology Transactions Law Group PC in Sunnyvale, California. In its boutique practice, the firm assists clients in structuring, documenting, and negotiating commercial transactions, including license, distribution, development, consulting, non-disclosure, outsourcing, content, hosting, strategic partner, and joint venture agreements, and also advises clients on issues relating to copyright, trade secret, trademark, and patent protection, open source software licensing, privacy, and anti-spam laws.
Joel was a partner at GCA Law Partners (formerly known as General Counsel Associates) in Mountain View, California, from 1998 to 2007. Before joining GCA, he was first an associate and then a partner at Fenwick & West in Palo Alto for a total of 11 years, spearheading its Licensing and Online Commerce group. Joel conceived and organized Fenwick's pioneering Internet Law Symposium in 1996 and co-authored its annual International Legal Protection for Software survey for several years. Before coming to California, he was an associate at Mayer, Brown & Platt in Chicago.
Joel received his J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School in 1982, and a B.G.S., with distinction, from the University of Michigan in 1972. Prior to becoming an attorney, he worked in computer programming and operations support in IBM mainframe environments for several years.
