Adam Tachner: Becoming a trusted advisor to Silicon Valley

[Music] welcome to the Reed Smith podcast career Footprints in each episode of career Footprints we'll ask our guest A Reed Smith Alum to share their career Story how their time at Reed Smith set them up for success and their advice for early career lawyers our goal is to surface insights from inspiring professionals careers that will help you find your professional success however you define that welcome back to Career Footprints uh our podcast series at Reed Smith looking at or listening to the incredible career Stories the career footpath of our amazing alumni I'm Alysia Miller and I am delighted to welcome my next guest that is Adam tner with the most impressive job title I have to say the possibly the largest uh business card you'll ever find so VP corporate development finance and chief legal officer over at Gro Adam welcome thank you so much you know they actually say that the shorter your title the greater the power so don't be impressed well I still am but thank you I still am welcome absolutely Welcome to our podcast I can't wait to share your career Journey with our listeners and especially the time s that you're going to be talking about your experiences at Reed Smith or actually crossby hey as I understand so not necessarily full on Reed Smith but let don't let me talk about it I'd love to hear more about you talk us through it sure it's a so first of all it's a pleasure thank you so much for having me it's uh it's a little humbling to realize I've reached that stage in my career where I have to spend some time reflecting uh backwards I I tend to focus more on what's next than what's come to pass so appreciate the moment to take a breather and look back I I actually grew up around the law in a sense um not big law but my father was a was a patent attorney uh who came to it relatively late in his own career he went to night school in the 70s he had been an engineer on the Apollo program in the 60s and and then became a patent attorney because he was an engineer who could write and um and so he had this great solo practice that he really enjoyed and probably wanted me to follow in his footsteps but but when I went to law school and saw what was going on in Silicon Valley I was really inspired after leaving University of Oregon or even before I finished actually I did my third year at what was then the Hastings College of Law uh the UC Law School in San Francisco and uh got a 2L job which extended into a full year internship at a little patent Boutique in San Francisco and they knew uh an attorney at Crosby HEI and they referred me over and he brought me into this kind of nent intellectual property team and I was really uh honored and privileged to be kind of a a co-founding member of that group there were maybe three or four of us they had maybe a year or two under their belts thus far and and then had some opportunities to help bring in clients and sort of build the practice amazing and that sort of first time in um in Crosby HEI what was it like sort of walking in what was your sort of first year or two light what was that sort of moment of you know oh my goodness I'm here I'm patent attorney new practice okay where's the deep end am I jumping in yeah well you know joining kby heia at that time was actually a wonderfully uh stimulating set of circumstances because it was a a good siiz firm as they went uh at the time we were a not a boutique but you know a specialist California firm we probably had on the order of a couple hundred attorneys up and down the coast and the Heart of it was in the Oakland area in the lake Meritt area of Oakland I don't even know if the firm still has an office there and uh Ed hey had started that firm somehow related to the fact that his father was one of the founders of Farmers Insurance and so there was an arrangement whereby the Crosby hefi team would have a kind of a no settlement policy on any litigation that they launch and so it was this wonderful place to learn how to be a litigator at a very practical level and often the stakes were not particularly high for Farmers uh and they would just go for it even on a case that was only worth thousands of dollars and so you had an opportunity to you know to really get in there understand the case uh and and make mistakes if if if that was unavoidable um kind of on the clock and there was a formal litigation training program and there was just a lot of super capable people I remember the firm had a full-time editor uh and sort of writing instructor who would work with you we had an amazing pellet department and it was just a very high quality large Boutique firm and and in in inside of that meu we had this small group Scott Baker Ed Lynch M Wittenberg Morgan toy these are names that'll probably be uh I mean other than Scott of course I'm sure is well still well known in a firm many of them have already moved on of course but it was a great place to learn all aspects of the trade at the same time though none of them was particularly technical certainly not in my field which was electrical engineering and so you had this kind of strong base of support and folks that knew intellectual property was something that was really important to their clients but also you know weren't fully familiar with how to service it and and basically just to sort of background that a little bit because I think there's intellectual property has changed so much it's probably worth spending just a couple minutes to Overlay that sort of broader economic history in that uh around 1981 or 82 Ronald Reagan as president had signed on to the formation of the cifc the court of appeals for the federal circuit and before that patent law had just been one of you know many fields that would go to any of the numbered federal circuit courts of appeal in the United States and so you had often a a a venue uh determination a race to the courthouse to figure out who would actually win the case and so you know you had absurd situations like in Kansas City if you filed in Kansas City Kansas you'd effectively pursue your case under one perhaps defense favoring set of laws and in Kansas City Missouri a completely other set right and so uh it was kind of an untenable situation this new court quickly Consolidated all of that law uh as a matter of Law and then really added more value to patents because there was you know the key to value in business in a lot of ways a key value to value in business is um predictability right and now patents were a little more predictably enforcable a little more predictably uh valuable and a book came out I remember uh late 80s early 90s called Rembrandts in the attic and it was about sort of finding these patents and really exploiting them and in effect that gave birth to the what became known as the patent trolling industry where they would enforce patents as a means of building profits independent of whether you were actually the innovator and so all of that was going on and that was overlaid of course with the birth of the internet the mosaic operating system which became Netscape came out in 1994 the summer I graduated law school I actually I still have the W issue of Wired Magazine that I was using when I should have been studying for the bar exam I was instead reading wire and so it was just a really fun time to join the practice and a really great uh context in which to to sort of bring this something new I wasn't just another Cog in an existing machine I had an opportunity to sort of entrepreneur build something new and that was very very exciting um sounds and yeah yeah and so so one of the senior Associates actually came to me just weeks after I joined the firm I still hadn't even gotten my bar results and he said so uh I have news uh I'm leaving the firm uh and he was like the there were two senior Associates so half of them quit and he said I'm I'm taking a job at Apple which I thought was very cool but by the way I have this I have this meeting set up with a tech company and um I want to bring you now because you know I can't do the pitch it's it's on Monday I this is probably Thursday or Friday and it's called xyl Lings and figure it out and so I didn't know what the heck to do and so I called I called my father uh of blessed memory Leonard and uh and I said dad I I got this opportunity I don't know what to do and remember this is before there were was really much in the way of the internet um certainly there weren't accessible web browsers in every Library um let alone in every home and so uh he said yeah look you go to the engineering library and you do some research and you figure out what these guys are all about I didn't know the first thing and so I did that and uh and I found some sort of thematically there was one particular guy uh who had published a ton of Articles uh for that company in in different technical journals and I I read up and I did my best to understand what was going on just to be conversent and then uh and then drove down on Monday I think I didn't know how to get down there I was probably 20 minutes late to the meeting I mean it was a tragedy in the making and I met these two lovely ladies who were running the patent Department there and they were sort of taking in the shock of having this you know first year associate pitching them instead of a very senior attorney and I to told them about uh the reading I had been doing and how fascinated I was by their fpgas their field programmable Gator ra and that there was this one inventor a guy named Steve trimberger that I was especially interested in reading more about and could they give me any information and they both laughed and they said oh uh Steve come in and and it was actually that guy was literally sitting outside their office waiting to meet his new patent attorney so I I I through just a tremendous stroke uh of luck I was able to sort of land uh xylin as a first customer and a first client and probably unfairly therefore developed a reputation uh as being like a rain maker because here it was September of my of my 1el my first uh year and I already had landed a significant Silicon Valley customer but that just just you know put me off on the right right foot gave me the opportunity to start to um get more opportunities like that to cross sell especially which is a big piece of being part of a big firm and and really building the practice in 96 we opened the San Francisco office and things kept accelerating from there so it was a wonderful place to start my career I feel incredibly fortunate it sounds it and and what a time and what a time when so much is going on in the world around you you know maybe before we even knew it there sort of such fundamental change with something like the internet and what that means and thinking about even now fast forward a few years uh and our overwhelming Reliance on all things internet all things browser all things being connected so I'm thinking you're what sort of coming up to mid level maybe senior associate time is that when you went in house talk us through that that sort of moment in which you said okay I've done amazing things here at Crosby HEI it's time for something new what what was that what went on for you yeah so uh that's right the first five or six years were really this combination of of Landing uh my own clients um bringing in a lot of startups watching a lot of them get very rich lot watching a lot of them Crash and Burn um just sort of getting a sense for the overall entrepreneurial experience from the safety of my uh of my Embarcadero Center office and then I got approach it was I was coming up on my on my sixth summer so yeah senior associate first time I would have been eligible for partnership and I got a call from um and I had a I had a nicely back balanced practice I was sort of a back room guy on litigation and then did patent Drafting and had three or four Associates with whom I worked uh on different accounts and a lot of counseling and letters and opinion Drafting and I got a call from a uh from a recruiter in a VC who had just sort of uh been working together to launch this spin out from Stanford it was called tpan that was kind of a working title and T ban had had come up with the idea of doing highfrequency radio on seos technology in other words using the same sort of chip technology that was used to make U memory and CPUs like Intel you know Pentium CPUs were the Big Brand back then and instead use that to make high frequency radio which previously had been much more complicated and difficult to fabricate and expensive to manufacture and I was like this sounds pretty cool but what you know what's the application that you have in mind are you going your cellular and they had this cool new idea that no one had heard of yet called Wi-Fi H and and and I had been trying to I had been trying to network I lived in this little Berkeley Bungalow and would take the BART train to commute into the City and uh had been trying to network two Gateway computers and was tearing my hair out with all the difficulties and I just thought the idea of sort of being able to have have that connected presence in this new internet era without having to find an ethernet cable or drill a hole in the wall was just the the best idea and uh I I just found myself sort of drawn to the big opportunity that that represented and so uh I found out uh after I gave notice that I had been on the cusp of being offered partnership and so yeah it was it was probably viewed by my by peers as an incredibly Reckless move I I think in hindsight it was probably a very lowrisk move in that you know the firm had decided they wanted me to be a partner and I'm guessing that if I had you know my startup had crashed and burned they might have invited me back but who knows but I was sure I was I was super happy to uh become a client and work with the team after that because the day that I started at teesband which became a Theos Communications uh there were literally two patents that were enforcement risks sitting on my share and so I think the first phone call I made was to Scott Baker to say Hey you know we're going to have to do some Defense work on this and we got and we sort of got to work him and Jonah Mitchell and that whole team so it was and bovich John bovich so it was it was a terrific next phase of my career and and and and one in which uh I was able to begin to sort of indulge that desire to be a member of the executive team and just kind of indulging this desire to not be the person that got the call when the crisis arose but rather could sort of see around the corner could understand the function of the law in the broader context of business got it yeah um and that was that was wonderful and it opened my eyes to how much I didn't know to how much I didn't understand about the different functions in a tech company I began learning about the operations side of it we we were a what's called a fabulous Semiconductor Company and what did it mean to actually design a chip but not actually build it and what were what were the sort of elements of trust why is it that every NDA gets negotiated why isn't there just a standard for this all these questions that were new to me and unfortunately still haven't been answered uh I think universally but but you can come up with sort of your own processes for for dealing with them uh and so it was a a wonderful first in-house experience and it turned out to be uh a terrific career move Wi-Fi was a great opportunity but also just from a team and process perspective it ended up being uh a really wonderful team to be a part of really The Fabulous semiconductor business had started in the in the late 70s and and and early 80s and then these these sort of dedicated Foundry companies like tsmc and uh now we've heard of companies like Global found countes of course Samsung is now in that industry that was kind of a new industry in the 80s and 90s before that there was a there was an adage that you know quote real men owned their own Fabs and companies like Intel and AMD you know were fully vertically integrated from sort of silicon or from from Sand to chips right and then there was this notion that no you shouldn't have to build your own Fab in order to build your own product there's someone who specialized in that who can then you know amortize that investment over many more customers and that was working out very well and and so we had a bunch of folks in the team that were really veterans uh in building that industry and understood it really well and I was able to sort of learn the industry from uh some incredible talent and more and more questions or more and more of a desire on my part to sort of better understand their functions led to me actually enrolling in a in a in an Executive MBA program at the time you Berkeley the hos School of Business at UC Berkeley had teamed up with the Columbia University business school and so they had a a 19-month MBA program that I started in 2007 um by this time grock had gone public so I was learning about you know Securities and such and I had been able to build a small team uh and when I started Business School uh I was still working but I announced to the company and to my team that I would be stepping back to half time that was actually the best management move I've ever made in my whole career because since I had been the only lawyer in the company for a long time everything had sort of come to me and then it would push it down to my to my team and I ended up becoming the bottleneck I think for a lot of stuff and by getting out of the way and saying hey instead of emailing me you'll email the team and they'll let me know if there's initial and they'll keep me inform I just revers the polarity of the workflow through through legal and that that alone kind of allowed me not to have to worry about being caught up on things I could focus on school and learning about these other functions and working on projects and it just uh it just played really nicely and I think my my team members were were happier for it they had more autonomy and more of an ability to build independent relationships with with their clients internally uh and the company just kept just kept growing we did a lot of Acquisitions I think we did on the order of a uh m&a transactions during my tenure with the company which was from 2000 until we sold it in 2011 and then in the two years after that as part of Qualcomm um we did private Acquisitions we did some public Acquisitions we Diversified our business and it was an incredible laboratory for learning again uh that broader sort of function of law uh in business I'm loving the concept of the laboratory for learning it's sort of I hear as as you're as you're talking about your career that this sort of continuous development it's not only about the law uh that you obviously need to maintain your your um your knowledge your your awareness your experience your capability but this breadth of understanding the business understanding the commercial functions understanding what your the guys down the corridor are doing and how to sort of integrate into that to be more than just the lawyer and as you say sort of the bottleneck or you know part of the cogs and the wheel and allowing others to step in and be the ones that are going to solve the solutions quicker rather than sort of perhaps as you said sort of standing in the way when there are so many other things that that that you are um focusing on that you're being asked to do and also allowing them to shine just as much that's what I'm getting that's what I'm getting from the conversation so far yeah I think that's I think that's an astute observation I think that I think the opportunity for that kind of learning inhouse is actually in many ways more accessible than it is in a law firm because in a law firm even if you as you know as I did right out of law school right even if you have direct access to your clients you're still really only having that direct access typically to the legal department the in-house legal department and you know and they're working they're they're not a profit Center they're a cost center generally speaking and so you're seeing things within a particular lens and not really getting out access to the broader business context uh in which the issues are being brought to you and typically also not having access to whatever transpired over the year or two that led up to the issue whether it was the invention of something new you know some employee leaving and stealing Trade Secrets when they took off and so on and so forth or even the sort of board level interactions there are partners of course uh at law firms who have that level of access but I think it's rare for the young associate to get get that I do see tremendous value in both paths though there's no question because what I missed when I went in-house was especially when I was alone in house until I started hiring other lawyers uh to join the firm which didn't happen for a few years what you miss is the the camaraderie the sort of operation at the kind of the Pinnacle from a quality perspective uh of the the practice of law you know we had amazing Attorneys at Crosby he I remember there was someone who was an expert in legal ethics like he had defended law firms against uh malpractice claims and and and I remember this issue came up with a client they were going public the underwriters had a concern about something and the client came to me and he was looking for a way out of this underwriter issue and I was actually able to confer with these ethics experts and get them to get the underwriters to admit that the particular opinion letter or whatever that that was causing the hangup was actually outside the bounds that they should have reviewed in their underwriting effort and you know I was a as my mother would say a little piter I you know I think I hadn't been out of law school I hadn't been out of law school for more than nine months when I made this observation and there's no way there's no way even in the chat GPT era that I would have spotted this issue uh independently or through research it was only by being able to sit down probably over lunch with an you know with a senior attorney who had 30 years of experience and sort of just Harvest that Insight that I was able to solve a really a fundamental issue that was preventing a client from going public so I I missed that uh I missed it a lot and and you never really get that back when you go in house what you have instead though uh is the opportunity to learn from any number of those sorts of teams if you have the discipline to always continue to have those sorts of lunches and take the time with all the different attorneys because now I didn't have just one firm that I could call upon but I had several and all of them had MCL sessions and they all wanted me to participate and so now I had more of a smorgus board of of different opportunities available especially at the end of every MCL year um in January February when you have all those hours that are available you can continue to learn but you have to be a little more self-disciplined about it you also lose the network you know when you're in a law firm you have uh you have all these colleagues but you also have a professional Network that you're always building because everybody feels obligated to put bread on the table and to win new clients and uh and you lose that when you go inhouse but I really made a point of continuing to meet people to have lunches and to not just sort of sit and eat at my desk every day and I would imagine that that at Big law firms right now that's something that you have to even remind folks of in the in the postco era where so much work is happening from home I think it's really easy to sort of feed on your seed corn and not kind of continue to build out your network and it's it's a curious reflection as well because you know something that we are trying to encourage Mar we are reinforcing and that's on the sort of learning side as well as you know I I hear our partners saying it just as much to our associate attorneys get out there meet your client they will want to have a coffee they will want to have lunch and by the sound of it you did you know this is something that you you actually relish you take the time for it is helpful to you yes of course you get to eat fantastic but you get to maintain that Network you get to find out actually this guy knows something this girl knows that's that's the expert I'm going to bring you in when absolutely and I was I think it was Benjamin Franklin who observed that whenever he wanted to get closer to someone he would ask them a favor you know if there were someone who he respected but feared he would ask to borrow a book from their Library you know something like that yeah and I and I think that it's through that sort of exchange of information that that actual exchange of favors as well that's how Silicon Valley works that's how I think in a lot of ways bu business Works ultimately and if you want to sort of break through and become a valued counselor not just an attorney but a valued counselor to your clients at the even the most senior level then they're going to assume that you have that level of connection because when they come to you for with a problem they're not asking you for the for the solution in the moment they're asking you to think about this and to reach out to your network and and then sort of build the right response whether that response is is a written response or is a process that's initiated you know by your efforts and you know it's it's curious on that I'm hearing a few things about you know your opinion and my question I guess is that that's coming is what is it that makes a terrific attorney in your eyes given your experience you know I'm hearing not necessarily the solution in the moment but actually using the platform finding out where the the level of expertise is from that breadth of nwor that will sit in the firm around you what else is it in your opinion that makes a good attorney yeah that's a great question so I think the theme but we should sort of pursue it because it manifests itself differently in each in each of the different branches of business I think that if you look at the bar exam in California anyway it's a three-day torture test in which and and sort of one of those days is spent on what used to be called uh uh this was 30 years ago practical I think it were called practical sessions or something like that and they weren't they weren't testing your knowledge of the law at all in fact it was intended to be an area that you probably didn't study uh unless you happen to choose an elective and they actually cautioned you don't call upon your knowledge of the law because what they wanted you to do was look at as this sort of portfolio this they gave you this little stack of paper it was good good half inch of of materi two-sided and you had three or four hours to synthesize you know from those materials which were both facts and law um memos and discovered information of some sort and then actual regulations and other relevant areas of lot it might have been something like landlord tenant or something like that and in four hours you had to just kind of answer the sort of key memo question that came from a senior partner in a law firm or something like that and to me that I think ended up best capturing what it meant to be a good attorney not that that's what a good lawyer does they sit and write memos for a living but you're issue spotting right and you're doing that sort of constantly almost as a matter of habit I don't even think about it right one of the hardest times I've been having as a I mean the reason I have such a long time right corporate development and finance and clo is that I've taken on more than just legal more and more through throughout my career to the point where now in terms of the real time I spend on the law it's maybe 10 or 15% maybe in a really heavy sort of potential litigation heavy week I might spend 25% of my time on the law but that is kind of a misrepresentation because I'm thinking about this stuff all the time and if you were to kind of you know if I came up with an avatar that represents what I do for a living it's probably like those um the agents in The Matrix if you remember the early Matrix where they're dodging bullets I mean you're what you're trying to do is just kind of see around the corner what's coming next and how can we as a company sort of best take advantage of or avoid that particular situation with the least amount of energy and money and just stay focused on what we really want to do for a living and so I I've had a hard time actually fully empowering my my even my my general counsel right the woman Cheryl Savage is an incredible attorney and she's you know really good at everything I just described and then she's also of course dealing with everything else that comes up the other 90% of her time is spent actually solving all these problems that I keep making and and so but it's hard because I'm the one who's in so many of these business meetings constantly spotting these issues and I have to make sure that she gets the the benefit of all those experiences from a legal perspective and sort of is able to evolve at the Leading Edge of the business in a way that that you know complement her depth and capabilities so that's I think what you're what a great attorney is is looking for you're looking for for someone at least inhouse that can kind of organically mix that sort of issue spotting and and practical business perspective into a whole package uh and who understands that there's always this imperative to have that network available to always be on the lookout for the best thinkers in a particular space and have them on speed dial when the most relevant because you know time is always against you isn't it just in now in our sort of closing moments Adam what what advice would you give to our young attorneys what is it that you would offer to them even if you know I think the the phrase that we hear a lot is you know the advice to my younger self but what is it that you would say to them you know given the potential longevity of this incredible career in this industry well I I do think that training in the law is just a wonderful basis for a career in business I mean you know I we haven't really given any time or credit of course to other fields of the law I've been completely focused on the on commercial and business law uh because that's that's always what I've done as an intellectual property attorney at first and then sort of more broadly as a general counsel if you're going to pursue you know public interest law of course or uh criminal uh prosecution or defense I mean these all have their own sort of mission and vision behind them and I don't claim to speak to those uh in any way but if your interest is in is in commercial law then I think always do your best to be mindful of the fundamental business interests that's that's really at issue because it's it's probably not captured in your memo or your you know the way you're talking to your client in your phone call right and the more I think you can prepare yourself to understand that context and to have a network that's available to help you with that um and to you know kind of quickly up to speed on what matters most to the client then I think the sort of higher that qu quality of service you're going to offer also don't have lunch at your desk like get out there and meet people and build a network um and really perhaps most importantly because the one thing you'll miss if you go in house is you won't have that just phenomenal network of uh senior peers um who have spent their whole careers doing exactly that right not having lunch at their desk and and kind of getting out there and meeting people and um and and want nothing more uh typically than to uh and to share the the benefit of all that time and energy with you that's why they're part of a firm and so just kind of fully take advantage of that I think people worry too much about making a fool of themselves i' I've make a career out of making a fool of myself and it's it's working out great so far I'm really enjoying it absolutely is it really really is and Adam thank you so much for giving us a glimpse of your career journey of your career thus far and I can't wait to see what new tech Innovation is coming around the corner that you're going to be helping a lead the way on it's been absolutely fascinating thank you thank you so much it was a pleasure and thank you to everybody else for joining the podcast we look forward to welcoming you next time career Footprints is a readed Smith production our producer is Ali mardle this podcast is available on Apple podcasts Spotify Google podcast pod beam and reedsmith.com to learn more about Reed Smith's Alumni network or if you're an Alum of the firm who wants to share your career story contact me re Smith glob senior director of alumni relations Laura caratz at alumni reedsmith.com this podcast is provided for educational purposes it does not constitute legal advice and is not intended to establish an attorney client relationship nor is it intended to suggest or establish standards of care applicable to particular lawyers in any given situation prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome any views opinions or comments made by any external guest speaker are not to be attributed to Reed Smith LLP or its indiv individual lawyers All rights Reserve