Mr. Phillips is a partner in the Corporate Department of Morrison & Foerster and works in its Palo Alto office.

Mr. Phillips combines his experience of over 20 years as a commercial lawyer in Silicon Valley with the perspective gained from five years at JDS Uniphase, where he served as Senior Vice-President, Business Development and General Counsel, from 1998 to 2003. Mr. Phillips’s specialties include financing and structuring of start up and other emerging businesses, and representation in all phases of mergers and acquisitions and of complex strategic and other commercial relationships with emphasis on technology licensing.

Representative clients with whom Mr. Phillips has worked during his career at Morrison & Foerster include BEA Systems , Novellus Systems , Micrel Semiconductor , TGV Corporation , Informatica Corporation , Cylink Corporation , Infinity Financial Technology , and Pericom Semiconductor . Mr. Phillips handled the initial public offerings of each of these representative clients and others during this period as well as general representation of many start up companies in various areas of high technology.

At JDS Uniphase, Mr. Phillips was responsible for its entire legal department and the negotiation and successful completion of over 30 mergers, acquisitions, and other strategic relationships for an aggregate consideration well in excess of $50 billion. Commencing in 1998 when Mr. Phillips joined then Uniphase Corporation, Uniphase diversified from its core commercial base business through a series of mergers and acquisitions to become a world-wide leading supplier of fiber optic components and modules for the telecommunications industry. Notable transactions that Mr. Phillips handled at JDS Uniphase included the merger of then Uniphase with JDS Fitel of Ottawa in early 1999 and JDS Uniphase’s acquisitions of three other public companies, Optical Coating Laboratories, Inc., Etek Dynamics, Inc., and SDL, Inc.

During Mr. Phillips’s five years at JDS Uniphase, he gained invaluable perspective as a principal in the negotiation and successful completion of a wide variety of acquisition, divestiture, and strategic commercial transactions. This experience in turn provides clients of Morrison & Foerster with an opportunity to obtain counsel during critical stages of a merger, acquisition, or other significant transaction from a lawyer who was a unique and first hand experience in understanding their responsibilities as a client and the business risks associated with any successful merger, acquisition, or complex commercial relationship.

 

Mr. Phillips earned his B.A. from Stanford University in 1972 and his law degree from the University of California at Berkeley (Boalt Hall) in 1976. He is licensed to practice law in the State of California and the Northern District of the Federal Court of California.