Joe FitzGerald, Pure Storage vice president and general counsel. (Photo: Jason Doiy/ALM)

The Pure Storage in-house department adopted a process with engineers and outside counsel to optimize patent filings that saved almost 400 hours of engineering worth at least $80,000 in company time last year. That innovation landed Pure Storage a finalist spot for Most Innovative Public Company Legal Department of the Year as part of The Recorder's California Leaders in Tech Law and Innovation Awards. Joe FitzGerald, the general counsel and corporate secretary of Pure Storage, recently discussed navigating two major acquisitions in the past year.

The Recorder: What are the distinguishing characteristics of Pure Storage's in-house legal department and the lawyers and staff that make it up?

Joe FitzGerald: Pure Storage's core values are creativity, customer first, persistence, ownership, and teamwork. Pure legal embodies and embraces those values in everything we do. Pure legal starts with a "get it done" attitude. Every member of the legal team from top to bottom is encouraged to drive the business forward and is empowered to make decisions and take risks to do so, while protecting Pure's culture and reputation.

Our legal team includes a diverse spectrum of people from a wide variety of backgrounds (law firm, corporate, government and nonprofit), all who share a business-first attitude and passion for driving growth in a fun, fast-paced and collegial atmosphere.

What was the biggest challenge your in-house team faced in the past year and how did you overcome it?

Growing a company inorganically is often both a challenge and an opportunity. In the past year, Pure seized this opportunity and acquired two companies, one in California and one in Sweden—Pure's first significant acquisitions in its history. This process required coordination between numerous internal teams and building many processes for the first time. Pure Legal spent significant time setting up and managing new tools and processes to ensure the completion of due diligence and preparation for signing and closing in a timely manner, as well as taking steps to ensure a smooth integration process.

The Pure legal team pooled expertise in all areas of the deals (M&A, corporate, IP and technology, employment, commercial) and formed deal teams to efficiently address all of these aspects, and assigned specific work to outside counsel, particularly where local-jurisdiction expertise was required. This required top-notch communication and coordination to meet demanding timelines.

Besides that challenge, what was your legal department's most significant accomplishment of the past year and why?

In June 2019 the Pure legal team completed a large patent acquisition, more than doubling the total portfolio to over 2000 assets, all while maintaining a constant head count. This, in part, was due to IP management tools deployed in 2018 (at a cost approximately half that of the previous tool) enabling far more efficient portfolio management. This acquisition has visibly strengthened the company's IP position in relation to competitors.

The pre-acquisition diligence and negotiation, and post-acquisition integration and strategic application of the acquired portfolio has been a huge effort on the part of the Pure legal IP team. To efficiently manage this task Pure legal marshaled resources from engineering, legal, the chief technology officer's team, and external specialists to quickly parse through the assets and report out on relevance to competitors and to the broader market. These assets are now being refined and targeted for strategic defensive use.