Mitchell Edwards was hired in February to be both the first general counsel and the first chief financial officer of BitTorrent, Inc., the San Franciscobased technology company best known for its peer-to-peer file sharing software. But he’s been so busy that he only allowed the company to announce his arrival in August. In a company with 50 employees, “there’s a remarkable efficiency in having one person take the two roles,” Edwards says.
After earning a master’s in international business and law at Oxford University and attending Stanford University Law School, Edwards became a partner at Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison. In 1997 he jumped to a small private equity firm, and spent the past four years at an Internet search company. As soon as he joined BitTorrent, Edwards was immersed in a dispute with Comcast Corp. which was limiting the Internet traffic of BitTorrent clients. Once viewed as a pariah that facilitated piracybut now a partner of large Hollywood companiesBitTorrent complained that its users were being unfairly targeted. In March both companies agreed that Comcast has the right to manage network traffic, but, moving forward, it will do so without singling out one technology.
| WHO | MOVED TO |
|---|---|
| Patent litigator Jerry Canada from Kenyon & Kenyon | Crowell & Moring in New York |
| Patent attorney and immunologist Robert Underwood from Hamilton, Brook, Smith & Reynolds | McDermott Will & Emery in Boston |
| Trademark litigators Robert Alpert and Joseph Villapol from Ladas & Parry | Bryan Cave in New York |
| Patent attorneys Alan Anderson, John Klos, Matthew Palen, Sharna Wahlgren and Christopher Young from Fulbright & Jaworski | Briggs and Morgan in Minneapolis |
| Patent attorney Stephen DeKlerk from Blakely Sokoloff Taylor & Zafman | Sonnenschein in Silicon Valley |
| Patent litigator Kurt Rogers from Latham & Watkins | Bingham McCutchen in New York |
| Entertainment lawyer James Nguyen from Foley & Lardner | Wildman Harrold in Los Angeles |
| IP litigators Chris Gilbert, David Henry and Gregory Perrone from Hughes & Luce | Patton Boggs in Dallas |
| Dan McCurdy from president of Lucent Technologies’ IP business | CEO of Allied Security Trust |
| Brian Hinman from CEO of Allied Security Trust | Vice President of IP at Verizon |
| IP litigators Arthur Beeman and Pamela Fuller from DLA Piper | Jones Day in San Francisco |
| Trademark litigator Michael Graif from McDermott | Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle in New York |
| Mark Allen Cohen from senior IP attach at the U.S. embassy in Beijing | Jones Day in Beijing |
