Francois Laugier

François is an international corporate lawyer focusing on technology-related transactions including corporate formation, financing, international expansion, M&A, licensing, and other commercial issues. He helps emerging companies and entrepreneurs achieve their dreams by resolving the legal obstacles they encounter and managing risk with strategic foresight. He also counsels founders, investors, early stage venture capitalists, and incubators on their business formation and commercial challenges. He is the current Co-Chair of the firm's Corporate & Business Transactions group.

Over the past 25 years, François has formed hundreds of tech companies, completed scores of mergers and acquisitions and financings as part of a company’s growth, and assisted dozens of startups in their sale to large private or publicly traded corporations. He counsels clients on a wide variety of issues including: * Technology licensing * Entity formation * Equity financing * Joint ventures * US and cross-border mergers and acquisitions * Purchase and sale of US or international operations * Corporate structure inversions (“flips”) * Employment * Intellectual property protection * Negotiating and drafting all types of business contracts * Stock options

A long time Palo Alto resident, François is licensed to practice in California, Washington DC, and the European Union, and is bilingual in English and French. François counsels clients from coast-to-coast in the US–including Silicon Valley, Boston, and New York–and across France on his clients’ formation and corporate needs. He has served as the President and is a current member of the Committee of Foreign Trade Advisors (Conseillers du Commerce Extérieur) to the French Ministry of Economy and Finance for the northwestern United States. He was also a co-founder of the French Tech Networking Society "DBF" and past president of the French-American Chamber of Commerce in San Francisco. He currently serves as an Adjunct Professor of International Business Law at the HEC School of Business in Paris where he lectures on entrepreneurship, technology, and international law.