Cynthia J. Cole

Cynthia J. Cole is a top technology transactions attorney who regularly advises large companies as they acquire other tech companies or their intellectual property.

For instance, she represented a subsidiary of China-based Haier Smart Home, the world's largest home appliance maker, in a $640 million deal to acquire all the shares of Carrier Global Corp.'s international commercial refrigeration business. Her work on the deal, announced in December, included drafting and negotiating ancillary patent and trademark agreements required for multiple international jurisdictions.

She said she works with clients to create "new ways of using and exploiting their IP" through deals with other companies. Those "completely bespoke agreements" must lay out "who ultimately profits from what gets generated from that agreement."

Cole compares the work to the unusual printmaking technique she is learning, called viscosity printing, which can lay down several colors at the same time in layers. Much like making those prints, her transaction work entails "understanding the layers of the development process and then uncovering those layers and sort of putting them back together in a different form."

To properly advise the clients, "you have to be able to understand the multilayered nature of the IP," she said. "You have to be able to understand that it isn't just a patent in itself or it isn't just [an IP] right. It's what does it represent in the market, and how can it be exploited going forward."

For one recent deal, Cole worked with the client to create a transaction-specific toolkit to analyze third-party use of data and open-source data sets regarding artificial intelligence.

Last May, Cole advised two tech companies on separate deals. In one, she represented Mozilla in its acquisition of a young company that had created software to spot fake online reviews.

Acquisition of a startup calls for paying special attention to "the potential copyright issues, the potential privacy issues, potential regulatory issues that may or may not have been addressed by the target" when it was developing its product, she said.

Even more complicated was the deal for the cloud-based digital workflow company ServiceNow Inc. when it acquired the German company G2K Group GmbH, which has technology that allows retailers to collect product and customer information across storefronts in real-time. "It's an AI solution used in a way that is a kind of surveillance," raising potential privacy and regulatory issues, Cole said, many of them international. "That necessitated a global review of how this technology could be used post-closing in multiple jurisdictions."

In addition to printmaking, writing professional and personal articles and occasionally singing in an all-lawyer rock band, Cole also teaches a course on data privacy at Northwestern law school's San Francisco campus.

-- Don DeBenedictis