Tech Tour is happy to welcome on board Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati as gold sponsor of 4 programmes: Tech Tour Growth (TBA), Tech Tour Health, Tech Tour Deep Tech and Tech Tour Energy.
Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati is a U.S. law firm, specialising in business, securities, and intellectual property law.
The firm also supports tech companies and investors from the EU and the U.K. through the entire U.S. life cycle. This includes expansion in the United States, fundraising, commercial partnerships, and M&A/IPO exit.
Operating Sectors
Wilson Sonsini is “horizontally narrow” and “vertically broad”. The firm works only with the world’s technology and life sciences pioneers and disruptors associated with market-changing innovation.
“We provide a wide array of legal services tailored specifically to the needs of those companies, e.g., corporate, commercial, IP, employment, data privacy and cybersecurity, regulatory, litigation, antitrust/competition, export control, etc.”
Examples of Customers and/or Beneficiaries
The archetypal example is Google.
Wilson Sonsini incorporated Google as a new company for Stanford’s graduate students Sergey Brin and Larry Page in 1998. Then, the firm introduced them to investors for their initial institutional financing round. Later, it was a lead counsel on Google’s 2004 IPO. Today, the firm continues to represent Google on mission-critical matters (including Google’s current antitrust dispute with the U.S. Department of Justice).
Similarly, Wilson Sonsini began working with Apple when Steve Jobs was building the company in the early days of Silicon Valley. Then, it acted as Apple’s lead IPO counsel when it went public in 1980.
Wilson Sonsini has acquired valuable expertise through its work with such technology-driven clients. In this regard, the firm is strategically well-positioned to seize opportunities created by a global economy in which businesses from all industries increasingly rely on technology—whether those businesses depend on innovation to manufacture products or deliver services.
The firm’s international experience includes serving clients in countries around the world. Wilson Sonsini represents both U.S. and foreign clients in a range of international matters, including global public offerings, cross-border merger and acquisition transactions, joint ventures, foreign investments, branch operations, as well as intellectual property.
Leadership and Culture
Wilson Sonsini’s legacy closely traces the birth and development of Silicon Valley. For nearly 60 years, the firm has represented the technology pioneers associated with virtually every milestone innovation.
Today, the firm is synonymous with ushering promising, innovative companies through their business life cycle. As its clients have grown, so has Wilson Sonsini. The firm now represents many of the largest companies in the world—and thousands of the smallest ones, too.
Every day, everyone at Wilson Sonsini has the opportunity to:
- partner with amazing clients,
- engage in stimulating and challenging work,
- collaborate with colleagues from diverse backgrounds who are among the best minds in our industry.
Biggest Achievements
As a Silicon Valley-headquartered law firm, we have represented more technology and life sciences companies on their venture financings, M&A transactions, and IPOs than any other law firm globally. Wilson Sonsini has led the IPOs for Apple, Doordash, Google, LinkedIn, Lyft, Netflix, Palantir, Roblox, Square, Tesla, and Twitter, among many others with milestone technologies.
Founded in 1961, Wilson Sonsini pioneered the widely-emulated Silicon Valley model of supporting high-growth companies as a legal and business advisor at all stages of their life cycle, i.e.:
- incorporation,
- financing,
- commercial scaling,
- M&A/IPO,
- and as a publicly-traded company.
The firm earned this position as the leading provider of legal services to technology and life sciences clients by representing the disruptive, market-creating companies that influenced every milestone marking an evolution in technology—from the semiconductor, computer, and software pioneers of the 1970s and 1980s to today's life sciences, internet, and social media innovators.
Global Impact
Wilson Sonsini goes beyond the mere provision of legal services and acts as a 360-degree strategic business advisor to maximise the likelihood of its emerging company clients’ success.
For example, the firm’s corporate partners regularly attend their clients’ board meetings (at no charge) and make thousands of connections each year between start-ups and investors, acquirors, and commercial partners.
Core Company Values and Other Achievements
Some of Wilson Sonsini’s core values are diversity and inclusion. The firm believes that a diverse and inclusive work environment results in better legal services for its clients and a richer work environment for its people. Its employees know that they belong to the “Wilson Sonsini family,” where everyone is welcome, and it seeks to recognise and eliminate unconscious bias.
This has resulted in the company being recognised as the most diverse U.S.-headquartered law firm by Law360, ranking No. 1 overall among firms with more than 600 attorneys in the publication’s annual Diversity Snapshot.
According to Law360, Wilson Sonsini has the highest percentage of equity partners of colour and the second-highest percentage of attorneys of colour (as of December 31, 2019).
In January 2021, for the second consecutive year, the firm also achieved a perfect score of 100 on the Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s 2021 Corporate Equality Index (CEI), the nation’s premier benchmarking survey and report measuring corporate policies and practices related to LGBTQ+ workplace equality.
Relation with Tech Tour
The company’s Tech Tour (TT) relationship is led by Daniel Kahn, Wilson Sonsini’s Director of Strategy and Business Development in Europe. Daniel has been involved with TT for several years, including the roles of president of one Israeli Tech Tour event and two French Tech Tour events.
