JOHN McGARAGHAN
Partner
Technology Transactions
John McGaraghan is a partner in the technology transactions practice at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati's Palo Alto office. John's practice focuses on intellectual property counseling and licensing, and the drafting and negotiation of strategic commercial contracts. John has deep experience in assisting companies with mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, and financing matters, and other complex business transactions involving technology and intellectual property that build and protect enterprise value.
John is a subject-matter specialist in the area of open source software licensing, advising a variety of companies, including open source software vendors, on issues associated with open source software that arise in day-to-day operations (both with respect to ingestion and use as well as contribution to and distribution of open source software), as well as in the context of acquisitions and other corporate level transactions. He is certified as a Black Duck Legal Professional.
John represents public and private companies through all stages of growth in the software, SaaS, media and content, big data, AI and automation, advertising, hardware, and semiconductor industries.
Before attending law school, John worked as a software developer and as a singer, songwriter, instrumentalist, producer, and performer.
SELECT CLIENTS:
- Alfresco
- Cadence
- Carbon3D
- Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
- Creative Commons
- Epic! Creations
- Google/Google Ventures
- Kodiak Robotics
- LiveRamp
- MongoDB
- Pensando
- Polycom
- Rambus
- salesforce.com
- Seagate
- ServiceNow
- Ultrahaptics
- The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
- Audience in its purchase of Sensor Platforms
- Audience in its sale to Knowles
- Brocade in its sale to Broadcom and associated divestitures to Arris, Extreme Networks, and Hitachi Data Systems
- Cortina in its spin-out of Cortina Access and sale to Inphi
- Cortina Access in its sale to Realtek
- CSR in its sale to Qualcomm
- Dreamworks in its sale of its Ptch business to Yahoo!
- Flipboard in its purchase of Zite from CNN
- Gigamon in its acquisition by Elliot Management
- Good Technology in its sale to BlackBerry
- Invisage Technologies in its acquisition by Apple
- KLA-Tencor in various acquisitions, including Orbotech
- LiveRamp in its sale of Axciom to Interpublic Group
- Rambus in its purchase of Snowbush IP's SerDes technology assets from Semtech
- Rambus in its purchase of memory interconnect business line from Inphi
- Seagate in its purchase of Samsung's hard drive business
- Socialcam in its sale to Autodesk
- Square in its acquisition of Weebly
- J.D., University of California, Hastings College of the Law
Magna Cum Laude; Thurston Society; Order of the Coif; Executive Articles Editor, Hastings Communication and Entertainment Law Journal - B.A., Anthropology, University of California, San Diego
- Member, Intellectual Property Section, American Bar Association
- Member, American Society of Composers and Producers
- Named to the 2018 edition of the "Rising Stars" list published by Northern California Super Lawyers
- "District Court Issues Injunction in hiQ v. LinkedIn Scraping Case," WSGR Alert, September 1, 2017
- Co-author with M. Sachet, T.J. Graham, S. McKinney, B. Chari, A. Pate, and A. Shevell, "Court Ruling Supports Contractual and Statutory Enforcement of Open Source Software Licenses," WSGR Alert, May 19, 2017
- "Open Source Software—Maximizing Benefit and Mitigating Risk," Healthcare Innovations Venture Investment Forum, Legal Issues in Life Sciences for Investors, April 2017
- Co-author with S. Bell, E. Durrette, D. Bish, and R. Strickland, "Federal District Court Refuses to Compel Arbitration, Holding That Zappos.com's 'Browsewrap' Agreement Was Not a Valid Contract," WSGR Client Alert, November 7, 2012
- Co-author with M. Wolk and L. Hantover, "Dismissal of Amazon Privacy Suit - CFAA Implications," Law360, July 19, 2012
- "Ohio District Court Allows Database 'Scraping' Case to Proceed on a Variety of Legal Theories," Cyberspace Lawyer, 2010
- "A Modern Analytical Framework for Monopolization in Innovative Markets for Products with Network Effects," 30 Hastings Communications and Entertainment Law Journal 179, 2007
- Adjunct Professor, University of California Hastings College of the Law
- Speaker, "What Funders Need to Know About Intellectual Property Provisions in PRIs, Contracts, and Grants," Georgetown Law's 34th Annual Representing and Managing Tax-Exempt Organizations Conference, Washington D.C., April 28, 2017
- Speaker, "IP in M&A Transaction," IP Symposium, Stanford Law School LLM Program, Palo Alto, January 29, 2015
- Co-presenter with Michael Wolk, "Getting Your Software License Right," Mozilla WebFWD Webinar, July 18, 2012
- Co-presenter with Suzanne Bell, "Database Scraping: Liability in the Access and Use of Third-Party Content," West Publishing Live Webinar, January 13, 2011
- State Bar of California
