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Sandi Allen
Friday, December 12, 2008
Inside Legal Services
Attorneys recall lure to work with tech startups
By Amy Castor, Special to Mass High Tech
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If you are a lawyer and prefer a little excitement in your cup of coffee, tech startups may be the answer. Startups are unlike other clients. They rely heavily on their attorneys to help them raise money, protect their intellectual property, and, hopefully, eventually take them through a liquidity event.
But what draws lawyers into the startup world? Some appear to be ‘closet entrepreneurs’ who take risks vicariously. Others are engineers at heart who feel a kindred spirit with the technologist. Or, perhaps they simply enjoy the thrill of the game. A few shared their stories.
Peanut butter jar
Jon Gworek vividly remembers the day early in his law career. His client, a 23-year-old Ivy Leaguer, invited him to see a prototype of an invention called a volumetric display.
“He had this elaborate contraption in his basement,” said Gworek. “It projected a 3-D image into a volume, which happened to be a peanut butter jar.” The young inventor demonstrated how a doctor might walk around the volume to get a better sense of where a tumor was located.
Gworek was thrilled to think he was witnessing something that could potentially change how doctors operate. “It was remarkable and I wanted to be part of it,” he said.
It was the sort of experience that made Gworek, now 45 and an attorney at Morse Barnes-Brown & Pendleton PC in Waltham, want to focus almost exclusively on startups.
He finds working with new companies to be much more rewarding than working for Fortune 100s, which is what he started off doing 17 years ago. “As a junior level lawyer, you feel like a bit player,” he said. “But with tech companies, you are in the trenches with your clients working to solve a problem together. And you feel like you have a real impact on the outcome.”
Gworek, who already had a bachelor’s degree in applied math and science, felt tech law was natural. “For me, it was almost my destiny,” he said.
In the Stars
Greg Moore, a partner at Ropes & Gray LLP in Boston who advises tech startups, found a slightly different inroad into tech law. Earlier in his career, he aimed for the stars.
“Ever since I was a toddler, I wanted to go to MIT and study astrophysics, so that’s what I did,” he said.
In the 1970s, he became fascinated with the study of cosmic X-rays using satellites. But just when he thought he saw his future in the cards, NASA started cutting those types of experiments from its budget.
Moore got mad. “I said, somebody has to figure out how this system works, so I went off to Harvard Law School fully intending to be a policy bureaucrat or something. Along the way, I spent a summer at Ropes & Gray and got seduced into corporate law,” he said.
He got hooked working with the startups. “The innovation that characterizes the tech sector makes it amazing to watch and fun to work in. You’re never doing the same thing twice,” he said.
He also feels a strong kinship with his tech clients. “I’m an engineer at heart,” said the 56-year-old Moore. “I can establish a rapport with a technologist more easily than someone who doesn’t have that bench-level credibility.” He joked: “I used to be a pretty mean Fortran programmer in the ’70s.”
Startup to Startup
Yet another angle into tech law is to start with your own tech startup, which is sort of what John Chory did.
Backing up a bit, before he launched his startup, Chory, who is now chair of WilmerHale Venture Group in Waltham, was as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Army.
While on active duty he spent a lot of time studying. In fact, he got bachelors degrees in computer science and psychology and a master’s in business administration.
When it came time to transition out of the Army, Chory wanted to return to Massachusetts where he grew up, so he did what came natural: he applied for yet another college degree and got into Harvard Law School.
It was in law school that Chory co-founded a company that collected data from law firms and sold it to law schools for use by students trying to make career decisions.
That startup experience helped Chory land a job at Boston-based Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP (formerly Hale and Dorr), a firm with a strong focus on the technology sector. A mentor taught him the ropes.
“Paul Brountas, an active corporate lawyer for technology companies, took me under his wing and introduced me to a lot of his clients,” said Chory, who caught on quick and eventually built a strong client base of his own.
Chory, 50, who has been practicing law for 20 years, says tech clients are stimulating. “They all have Ph.D.s, unlimited energy and optimism, and they work like crazy,” he said.
To vouch for his commitment to his clients, Chory saves and wears all the baseball caps they give him with their company logos on them. He said: “My kids say, ‘Why can’t you just get a hat that has Boston Red Sox on it?’”
“I love my companies,” he tells them.
Amy Castor is a freelance writer in Amherst.
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