Kandace Watson

Watson works on deals that serve a greater good, whether it be an acquisition that will help cancer patients through less invasive testing or improving the safety of airplanes through a transaction in the aerospace industry.

“What makes the practice of law fun and exciting for me is really closing a deal and knowing the next day someone’s life will be better because that deal happened,” Watson said.

A corporate partner in San Diego, she advises companies in matters including corporate governance, mergers and acquisitions, patent and technology licenses and general business matters. She prides herself as being a corporate strategist and enjoys being able to leverage her transactional experience to guide clients through complex deals that have never been done nor have precedent.

Some of her most recent work includes representing Oncocyte Corp. in its acquisition of Chronix Biomedical, a biomedical company with operations in Europe. The acquisition was announced in February and closed in April 2021.

“One of the interesting challenges is that Oncocyte originally entered into a patent license and collaboration with Chronix and then we needed to convert that into an acquisition,” explained Watson. “So I did both and it’s rare that an attorney has the depth of patent licensing expertise and the depth of mergers and acquisition expertise in order to do not only an international patent license, but also to be able to actually draft that whole thing, do it to consummation and then to convert or integrate that into a cross border acquisition.”

Other work she has handled in the last year included leading a settlement of a $100 million lawsuit by a U.S. bankruptcy litigation trustee against her clients, the former directors and officers of Patriot National Inc.; advising ResMed in its investment in Xealth Inc.’s $11 million Series A financing round and leading the successful spin off of Phyre Technologies Inc.’s aerospace assets from a California corporation to a Texas corporation.

Over the last year, she was also active in broadening the access to information about the Paycheck Protection Program through the Association of Corporate Counsel, various social media platforms and her network.

“I really tried to get information out to people of what our federal government was trying to do to help individual sole proprietors as well as larger companies get through the global pandemic,” she added.

— Kamila Knaudt