About
Who am I: My name is D. C. Toedt III. I’m a lawyer with a limited private practice based in Houston; I’m licensed in Texas and California as well as in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
Why this Web site: I’m building this Web site because I like having carefully thought-out contract clauses and related reference information at my fingertips, and also because I dislike reinventing the wheel and maybe leaving out something important.
Contact information: Comments and suggestions are welcome — please post them on the appropriate page, or email me at dc att toedt dott comm (spelled out that way to try to fool spambots). CAUTION: Posting or emailing me a comment will not establish an attorney-client relationship between you and me; to avoid jeopardizing any attorney-client privilege you might have, do NOT send me any confidential or privileged information.
[A long-time colleague urged me to billboard my personal credentials here, so as to differentiate this Web site from other contract-generating sites.]
My legal background: I used to be a partner at Arnold, White & Durkee, one of the largest intellectual-property law firms in the U.S. (now part of the national litigation firm Howrey LLP). I did mostly software-related work, including for a number of clients that you’ve probably heard of. I received an “AV” rating (”very high to preeminent”) in Martindale-Hubbell’s independent peer-review survey of lawyers outside my firm. My partners elected me to a position on AW&D’s governing committee.
I left AW&D to become vice president and general counsel of BindView Corporation, which was then a newly-public software company. As outside counsel I had helped to start the company and worked with its principals in negotiating software license agreements and other sales contracts. My timing in going in-house proved ironic, in that the dot-com crash came soon afterward, but we successfully navigated the software industry’s nuclear winter. A few years later we were acquired by Symantec Corporation, one of the largest software companies in the world. I left the company, along with the other non-operations executives, after helping Symantec complete its initial integration of the acquisition.
Education: I earned my undergraduate degree, with high honors, from the University of Texas at Austin; I majored in mathematics, with a good bit of physics and history thrown in. After service as a U.S. Navy nuclear engineering officer to pay back my ROTC scholarship, I returned to UT for law school, where I was on law review.
Selected publications: I served as editor and principal author of a one-volume treatise, The Law and Business of Computer Software, published by West Group. It’s still in print, although eventually I opted out of preparing the annual updates, so West released the second edition under the new author’s name. I was also the principal drafter of the Model Software License Provisions project of the American Bar Association’s Section of Intellectual Property Law.
Prounouncing my last name: My last name is pronounced “Tate,” like the pronunciation of House Minority Leader John Boehner’s name. Since birth, my family and friends have called me “D. C.” because of the Roman numeral III after my name. (If you have an overwhelming desire to know what the D. C. stands for, you could look it up.)
More details: See my LinkedIn profile (opens in a new window).
