Silicon Valley Skyline LLP

Integrated Counseling

 

After working for, or negotiating with many of the most successful private and public companies in the world, we have developed a comprehensive and multidimensional approach to legal practice.  We call it "Integrated Counseling."  Here is a summary of our Integrated Counseling philosophy.

 

Your business is continuously balancing resource allocation, OPEX investment, and revenue generation.  You can usually make more money by spending more, but where is the optimal balance?  And what do you have to do today to achieve an optimal outcome at some point in the future?  Your business is not simple, and your decisions are typically based on imperfect data.  Sometimes you know what you don't know, and sometimes you don't.  Sometimes you may guess what your competitors will do, but often you will not.  And yet, you make decisions every day, knowing that some of your decisions may not be right, and even when right, some of them will turn out poorly.  But that is OK, that is what winning companies do well.  The winners will build and maintain a margin of error, continue to check progress against expectations, and course-correct as needed.  You will not get it right from the beginning, and you know that, you accept it, and you move forward accordingly.

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There is one thing that separate the winners from the losers in the long term:  the winners make better decisions, react to mistakes faster, and course-correct better.  Not every time, but on the average.  And the secrets to this are drawing on broader experience, taking into account more variables, anticipating a broader range of possible outcomes, using more sophisticated analytical frameworks to model results,  and making more informed decisions.  Oh, and having better instincts.  Not every time, but on the average.

 

That is how we see your legal needs, and that is how we work with you through Integrated Counseling.

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Integrated Counseling

 

To support your business, we employ a legal approach that draws on a wide range of relevant law and business areas, and we give you actionable advice.  We tell you the pros and cons like other lawyers, but we go one step further and also suggest specific solutions.  Our solutions and advice will often bring together multiple levels of analysis to optimize decision-making using limited data, such as legal analysis in multiple relevant legal fields, factual analysis and research, statistical analysis, analytical modeling, game theory, accounting principles, offensive and defensive litigation strategies, IP assertions and defense, international considerations, risk-benefit analysis using historical behavioral patterns, and some good intuition and common sense.  Because we understand your company, your business model, your industry and your technology, we can optimize our legal advice to you so that you can optimize your business decision-making. 

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As part of our integrated counseling, we combine expertise in a wide range of legal areas with a deep understanding of relevant technologies and business models.

• If you are a small startup, our advice to you will draw upon our experience with small companies that need to move fast while tolerating a wider risk margin.  Our advice to you will also draw on our experience with large companies that know how to effectively exploit their leverage to minimize their liability exposure.  We move fast with you, but we remind you when appropriate that faster is not always better.  Faster is just one of the ingredients needed for success.  Getting it right on the average and optimizing the outcome in the long term remain the ultimate goals.  Regardless of what you are going through, we have probably seen something similar before, and if we have some good advice for you we will share it.

• If you are a large company, our advice to you will draw upon our experience with similar companies from various industries.  We have seen well-managed companies that operate in competitive industries and maintain a high profit margin (think Intel in the semiconductor space).  We have also seen companies that successfully transitioned from a legacy licensing model to a SAAS framework (think Adobe with its move to the cloud).  We have also seen companies that invested heavily into huge patent portfolios that ultimately did not make a practical difference in the long term (a conversation best had over coffee).  We have also seen large companies forcing small companies to sign highly asymmetrical and overbearing agreements, but given the balance sheet of the little guys, the large companies received illusory benefits and ended up losing more over time.  When we advise you, we will integrate across all of these experiences and give you our best advice.  Regardless of your industry and business model, we have probably seen something similar in the past, and we should have some helpful solutions.

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We take on few clients, and we don't want to be everything to everyone.  If our philosophy aligns with your business and you operate in one of our industry areas, let's talk and decide if we are the right legal counsel for you.

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Integrated Counseling allows us to draw on various legal areas, adjust the economics of the transactions, leverage our experiences with similar transactions, recall and apply helpful solutions from other industries, and engage effectively with your business partners to reach win-win outcomes.