Technology, Telecommunications and Outsourcing

Technology: Understanding Your Business Needs and Capturing the Value of Your Technology Assets

Innovation moves quickly. Our success lies in our commitment to understanding your technologies and the context in which you make business decisions about your products and services. We pride ourselves on constantly learning about new technologies and on helping create new business models. Bringing our diverse technical, business and legal training to the fore, we address clients' specific needs by structuring and documenting a wide range of business relationships that affect or are affected by intellectual property. Keeping pace with innovation allows us to better serve your ever-changing needs.

Putting It All Together

Our commitment is to provide you with a broad complement of services, including the following:

• Commercialization Strategies. Once we understand your business and technology, we work with your technical, business and financial teams to recommend strategies to accomplish your business objectives. Through careful planning, we can help you maximize the value of your patents, copyrights, trademarks or trade secrets by preparing and negotiating licenses, joint venture agreements, cooperative marketing agreements, business combinations and other arrangements.
• Technology Transfers. Whether in connection with a sale, acquisition or merger of a business or a transfer of a discrete technology, we counsel clients about and prepare agreements for the transfer of rights in all forms of technology and intellectual property.
• Technology Outsourcing. We provide strategic advice and help craft agreements for businesses that acquire or provide outsourced technology services by means of a service bureau, application service provider arrangement, web hosting service, Internet service or other arrangement.
• Trade Secrets. We develop trade secret protection programs, write confidentiality agreements and advise on various other techniques to preserve and enhance the value of trade secrets.

Telecommunications

Whether you are a buyer or seller of telecommunications services, our lawyers bring extensive experience from a variety of disciplines to provide cutting-edge advice. Virtually all traditional telecommunications companies, as well as related media, information and interactive services, are undergoing profound changes occasioned by both the exponential growth in new technologies and by significant new legal developments. We have a thorough understanding of and an appreciation for the nature of these businesses and the special legal challenges they face. This familiarity enables us to provide you with creative, practical advice designed to solve problems, advance transactions and close deals.

Our clients in the telecommunications industry include the following:

• Major regional telephone companies
• Cellular telephone companies
• PCS providers
• Wireless and cable subscription television operators
• International satellite telecommunications companies
• Television and radio stations
• Subscription television content providers
• Internet companies
• Equipment and technology providers
• Institutional investors and lenders

In addition to our transactional and regulatory work in the telecommunications field, we provide our clients with related advice in connection with mergers and acquisitions, financing, contract negotiations, corporate, tax, intellectual property, securities regulation, labor and employment, governmental relations and antitrust matters. We also regularly represent other important participants in the telecommunications industry such as lenders and investors providing debt and equity capital, companies providing equipment and technology to telecommunications companies and large users of telecommunications services in negotiations with service providers.

Outsourcing

Since the early 1990s, our lawyers have been leaders in advising clients in negotiating technology and business process outsourcing arrangements throughout the world. We have helped evolve the models for outsourcing in industries as diverse as financial services, pharmaceuticals, software publishing and manufacturing. As outsourcing management techniques and financial strategies have evolved, we have helped guide our clients to improve the likelihood of achieving all their corporate outsourcing objectives.

Our attorneys work closely with our clients'' business, financial and technical experts to define the scope of work and provide wise strategic counsel to senior management. Using our in-depth legal, financial and technical knowledge, we structure contractual relationships that address the needs of all parties to the transaction. We recognize that the most successful outsourcing transactions require solutions that create long-term alliances among the parties.

The firm''s outsourcing transactions have included the following:

• Information technology operations, including the data center, desktop and networks; telecommunications; and applications development and maintenance
• Business process outsourcing, such as accounting, financial technical analysis and bookkeeping operations
• Facilities and cafeteria operations
• E-commerce enterprise outsourcing