By Brooks Igo
(Sept. 11) – Holland & Knight announced on Tuesday that it has tapped veteran corporate counsel Toni Nguyen, most recently the senior vice president and general counsel of Upland Software, to join the firm’s Austin office as senior counsel.
Nguyen, a council member of the State Bar’s Corporate Counsel Section, has also held senior-level positions in the corporate legal departments of Luminex Corporation, Belo Corp. and Travelocity.com over the past 15-plus years.
“Toni is incredibly well-connected within the general counsel community and has a reputation of excellence,” Mark Davis, executive partner of Holland & Knight’s Austin office, said in a statement.
“Toni is the perfect person to build our corporate and transactional practice in Austin.”
Nguyen says it was a good time to use what she has learned as a business adviser and “thought partner” in the corporate world at a law firm, where she is also excited to work with multiple lawyers from different practice areas.
“It is a big adjustment for me after 15 years in-house, but the Holland & Knight family has been very warm and welcoming,” she says. “I’m excited to immediately add value and impact in understanding how a client thinks and what drives the different stakeholders within a company.”
At Upland Software, an Austin cloud-based software company, she handled and managed the $675 million company’s commercial and technology transactions, IP portfolio, litigation, compliance and corporate governance practices.
Last November, Nguyen helped Upland purchase Qvidian Corporation, a leading provider of cloud-based RFP and sales proposal automation software, for $50 million. It was the company’s largest acquisition at the time, according to an Upland announcement.
In her practice at Holland & Knight, Nguyen will advise on technology transfers and intellectual property licensing, electronic commerce and information technology, intellectual property law, general commercial transactions, mergers and acquisitions, corporate governance, and data security and privacy.
After receiving her law degree in 1993 at the University of Texas, Nguyen pursued her dream of “being the next Connie Chung” and became a TV news reporter in Beaumont at KDFM-TV6.
She left the news business after one year and began her legal career as an intern at the Texas Supreme Court for then-Justice Nathan Hecht and later clerked for the now-deceased Judge Jerry Buchmeyer of the Northern District of Texas.
Nguyen worked in private practice at Vinson & Elkins and Gray Cary Ware & Friedenrich (now DLA Piper) before taking her first in-house position as a senior attorney at Travelocity in 2003. She built an invention-disclosure process that doubled the DFW-based travel company’s patent portfolio and was eventually promoted to associate general counsel before she left.
“Travelocity set the tone for my staying in-house as long as I did,” Nguyen says.