© 2017 The Texas Lawbook.
By Brooks Igo
(March 30) – Van Lindberg, Rackspace’s former vice president of intellectual property, has returned to private practice at Dykema Cox Smith as senior counsel in San Antonio, the firm recently announced.
Lindberg, who was at Haynes and Boone before his in-house tenure at San Antonio-based Rackspace, says he saw an opportunity to better serve corporate clients.
“Working from an in-house perspective, I realized there was still a lot of need for people in private practice who understood how in-house counsel think,” he said.
At Rackspace, Lindberg led the managed cloud computing company’s defense against patent trolls. He says patent law abuse is an increasingly important issue, especially in Texas, which Lindberg notes has the largest number of patent trolls.
“It ends up being a way to use the legal system to extort money out of companies doing well,” said Lindberg, who was involved in five major disputes at Rackspace. “We fought back and started winning. You have to be willing to step up and fight.”
Lindberg says the two major issues he is watching are the TC Heartland case at the U.S. Supreme Court and patent reform efforts in Congress.
Another area Lindberg was prominently involved with at Rackspace was developing relationships with open source communities such as the OpenStack Foundation, Linux Foundation and Docker, Inc. He says one of the unique things he will be able to offer at Dykema is assisting clients to be successful using open source software.
© 2017 The Texas Lawbook. Content of The Texas Lawbook is controlled and protected by specific licensing agreements with our subscribers and under federal copyright laws. Any distribution of this content without the consent of The Texas Lawbook is prohibited.
If you see any inaccuracy in any article in The Texas Lawbook, please contact us. Our goal is content that is 100% true and accurate. Thank you.