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Fish & Richardson P.C. is a national law firm with over 350 lawyers in ten offices: Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Dallas, Delaware, New York, San Diego, Silicon Valley, Twin Cities, and Washington, DC. The firm is one of the largest firms practicing intellectual property, litigation, and corporate law and the only firm with a truly national intellectual property practice. Founded in 1878, the firm represented Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and the Wright Brothers. For 125 years we have served great innovators, helping to protect countless ideas, nurture discoveries, and bring new concepts to market. The firm prosecuted and litigated many of the fundamental patents of an industrialized America, serving corporations creating the cutting-edge technologies of the day: the telephone, the air-brake, the steam turbine, the automobile, and the radio. Frederick Fish, the firm's founder, was for many years the acknowledged leader of the patent bar of the entire country at a time when patents were more important than they had ever been. Today, the firm continues to represent great innovators working in cutting-edge technologies.

Nixon Peabody is one of the largest law firms in the United States with more than 800 attorneys collaborating across 21 major practice areas in 17 office locations, including Washington, D.C. , New York, Boston, Chicago, London, Paris, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Shanghai, and Silicon Valley. Nixon Peabody has deep experience representing research institutions and universities, and the life sciences and technology-based startup companies that emerge from these institutions. Extensive experience on both the investor and company sides of financing deals enables us to make introductions that are beneficial to both companies in search of funding and venture capital firms looking for exceptional companies in which to invest. Our attorneys negotiate, structure, and close venture capital funding deals and all types of strategic alliances and joint ventures. We help our clients know what to expect throughout the financing process and how to avoid common pitfalls. Our relationships with a broad network of investors nationwide enable us to negotiate the most favorable terms and conditions for all types of private equity issuance. We offer full-service corporate capabilities emerging businesses need as they mature. Nixon Peabody has a robust Intellectual Property Practice that counsels technology and life sciences companies on due diligence matters, patent prosecution, patent interference, patent application, patent reexamination, patent reissue, transactional matters, and litigation.

Partner Organizations

Whether you want to start your own nonprofit or for-profit organization, or create social and environmental changes from within a company, Smith's Center for Social Value Creation (CSVC) will equip you to tackle today's complex global issues and create innovative business solutions. CSVC offers real-world field experience, cutting-edge coursework and research, and targeted career planning to connect you with opportunities to effect change and resources to put your ideas in motion. Our mission is to develop leaders with a deep sense of individual responsibility and the knowledge to use business as a vehicle for social and environmental change.

Founded in 1986, the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship is a top-tier entrepreneurial institute recognized around the world as a leader in enterprise creation. Forward looking and community focused, the Center actively encourages a real-world business culture that innovatively bridges the theoretical with the practical.

FounderCorps is an organization that is managed by experienced technology entrepreneurs for the benefit of entrepreneurs in Washington, DC, Northern Virginia and suburban Maryland.  Our members are experienced technology entrepreneurs who have started, managed or exited successful technology businesses. We share a common purpose – to promote a broader and deeper technology entrepreneurial community in our region.

FounderCorps promotes technology entrepreneurial development by actively partnering with existing organizations to create a supportive infrastructure for technology entrepreneurship.  Through our own programs and through these partnerships FounderCorps intends to bring together the disparate threads existing in our community and create a supportive and coherent infrastructure to support regional entrepreneurial development.

The National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance supports technology innovation and entrepreneurship in universities and colleges to create experiential learning opportunities for students, and successful, socially beneficial businesses. With a membership of nearly 200 colleges and universities from all over the United States, the NCIIA engages more than 5,000 student entrepreneurs each year, leveraging their respective school campuses as working laboratories and incubators for businesses and ultimately helping them to bring their concepts to commercialization.

The University of Maryland created the Office of Technology Commercialization in December 1986 to provide expert guidance, support, and assistance in safeguarding intellectual property, encouraging research, facilitating technological transfer, and promoting collaborative research and development agreements with industrial sponsors. The University's many innovations continue to stimulate the local economy, provide valuable products for public use, and help fuel research and entrepreneurial initiatives through inter and intra-University collaborations. OTC is proud to act as a liaison between University members and the business community to further these projects.

SocialMatchbox.com is a trusted source of straight up information, news, and perspective related to the software and web product community here on the East Coast.  SocialMatchbox.com is published by Robert Neelbauer, an active member of the Washington, DC-Baltimore, MD-Northern VA web and software product communities.  Contributors include prominent venture capitalists, web developers and designers, attorneys, business community leaders, and most importantly: entrepreneurs.

Tech Cocktail is a literal “cocktail” of emerging technology news, people, startups, products, and innovations for the true tech enthusiast. Founded in 2006 as a simple community-building event, Tech Cocktail has morphed over the years into a full-fledged tech news blog and media company with thousands of fans, followers and supporters across the globe. Tech Cocktail has hosted local mixers, breakfasts, conferences, festivals and other events across the country that have attracted thousands of attendees, helping entrepreneurs by educating as they showcase their latest achievements and the local technology communities they live in. Working with Tech Cocktail has helped start-ups across the country find employees, co-founders, funding and even become acquired.

Friday, October 14, 2011