Larry W. Sonsini

In 1966, Larry W. Sonsini graduated from UC Berkeley School of Law and joined McCloskey, Wilson and Mosher, a firm that was at the time providing legal services to pioneering technology companies in the peninsula just south of San Francisco.

Today, Sonsini chairs the powerhouse firm that bears his name and helped give rise to the region now known as Silicon Valley. And he shows no signs of slowing down.

"I'm 71. In legal business, that's not old," Sonsini chuckled. "I'm a young guy at heart."

Sonsini said the firm remains committed to serving all manner of technology companies, from startups to fully formed public companies. Under his leadership, it now has a dozen offices. Two were added in the past year.

Wilson Sonsini entered Europe for the first time last September with an office in the Belgian capital of Brussels, which houses the European Union's legislative and regulatory bodies. Sonsini said that office was a response to increasing European regulatory work related to large corporate transactions.

"We thought it would be more efficient to have our own team over there," Sonsini said. "We think of Brussels as an extension of our antitrust team in Washington D.C. and Palo Alto."

The firm also established an informal satellite office in San Francisco's South of Market district, popularly known as SoMa, in June. The SoMa office, which Sonsini called a "quasi-incubator," is aimed away from traditional legal services and focuses on fostering collaboration among firm lawyers, startups and investors.

Even while serving as chairman of the firm, Sonsini still brokers transactions among technology clients. He has advised on some of the most prominent technology company public offerings in history, including Google Inc.'s 2004 offering that raised $1.7 billion and LinkedIn Corp.'s offering last year that raised $352 million. In 1980, he counseled Apple Inc. on its IPO.

Foster City-based E2open Inc., a cloud-based networking provider, turned to Sonsini and his firm for representation in its $70 million initial public offering in July, one of the first technology companies to begin publicly trading following Facebook Inc.'s $16 billion IPO in May. Sonsini and his legal team also advised Utah-based Fusion-io Inc., a manufacturer of flash memory storage devices, in its $291 million IPO that priced last November.

"The quality of enterprises in the technology space continues to rise," Sonsini said. "We're seeing good cash flow, good business models and good technology all around."

- KEVIN LEE