Information Technology – Systems & Solutions

Meeting the Needs of the Global IT Industry

Latham’s lawyers get it. They understand the economic, market and regulatory climate in which IT companies offer software, hardware and services. Latham uses this experience and knowledge to provide clients with the most current, strategic and practical legal counsel possible, covering all complex issues they face around the world.

Moreover, a number of the team's lawyers have held general counsel and other in-house counsel positions at private and public companies within the IT industry, and utilize that experience when advising clients.

Key Practice Areas

Latham's IT clients global resources include:

• Antitrust & Competition
• Company Representation
• Employee Benefits & Compensation
• Intellectual Property 
• Financing
• Mergers & Acquisitions 
• Real Estate
• Strategic Litigation
• Tax
• Technology Transactions 

Clients in the IT industry turn to Latham & Watkins at all stages of their development, from start-up to public company, and from local business to global enterprise. The firm's recent IT experience include representing:

• Delivery Agent as primary counsel for its technology transaction matters, including licensing agreements with Time, MTV, E!, Electronic Arts, CBS, Turner Broadcasting, Dreamworks and Interscope Geffen A&M Records
• Electronic Arts (EA) in defense of a purported class action brought by current and former collegiate athletes against the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), the Collegiate Licensing Company and EA in the US District Court for the Northern District of California
• Symantec Corporation, a global software company, in a number of pending patent infringement actions brought in a number of different forums. Latham has also represented Symantec in other patent matters relating to anti-virus, storage and related technologies
• Oracle Corporation, an integrated business software and hardware systems company, in their US$7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems Inc., a provider of network computing infrastructure solutions
• NetApp, a computer storage and data management company, with day-to-day employment and benefits advice, including in relation to the grant-of-share options under its global incentives plan to European employees and senior executives, and its bonus and commission plans.  In addition, Latham represented NetApp, Inc. in its acquisitions of Engenio, the external software storage business of LSI Corporation and Akorri Networks, Inc., a data center management software provider
• Intermolecular in an initial public offering on the NASDAQ Global Select Market, valued at US$96.5 million
• DG FastChannel, Inc. on Hart Scott Rodino (HSR) merger control filings in connection with their US$517 million acquisition of MediaMind Technologies Inc., a digital advertising company
• KIT Digital Inc. in its acquisition of Polymedia S.r.l., a Milan-based developer of management software
• Quest Software, Inc. in its acquisition of BakBone Software Incorporated, a provider of real-time continuous data protection, deduplication, replication, disk-based and tape backup and recovery services
• the CEO of a venture-backed software startup company in a criminal grand jury investigation brought by the US Department of Justice, the UK’s Office of Fair Trade and the Competition Bureau of Canada, alleging improper customer allocation