Our Founder and Your Teacher
David W. Tollen is one of the industry’s leading authorities on software licensing and cloud computing agreements. His particular expertise is in making complex topics easy to understand and engaging — and he’s been widely recognized for both.
He is the author of The Tech Contracts Handbook, a perennial American Bar Association IP bestseller. David graduated with honors from Harvard Law School and has degrees from Cambridge University in England, and U.C. Berkeley – where he now teaches IT contracting. He’s also served as General Counsel of a publicly traded software company, as Vice President of Business Development for a technology start-up, and as a lawyer in the Silicon Valley offices of Morrison & Foerster LLP prior to starting his own firm.
In addition to founding Tech Contracts Academy® LLC, David is the founder of Sycamore Legal, P.C., a boutique law firm in the San Francisco Bay Area. He and his staff represent both buyers and sellers in contracts about cloud computing, big data, software licensing, and other IT relationships. They also advise on intellectual property and data privacy issues related to tech contracts. Sycamore Legal’s clients include Silicon Valley startups, and some of the best-known and most influential companies in the world, like Lockheed Martin, Sabre, Del Monte Foods, and the World Wildlife Fund. David also serves as an expert witness in litigation about IT contracts. And he is a sought-after industry speaker, and thought-leader.
For more about David, including a list of his publications and illustrative speaking engagements, including podcasts, please visit his bio page here. Some examples of podcasts alone during 2023: In July 2023 David contributed to a Law Subscribed podcast about AI and other technologies impacting contracting. David’s wide-ranging interview with host Matt Kerbis addresses the future of legal practice, including potential threats to our jobs. But the conversation goes further and covers the way major technologies reshaped historic societies and what that says about our future. Listen to the conversation here: https://lawsubscribed.com/#davidtollen. Later in the year, David engaged in conversation with PracticeLeague LegalTech; check out that podcast here: Artificial Intelligence in the Legal Profession. David also teamed up with Parley Pro for a webinar, Our Future Jobs: AI & Other 21st Century Contracting Tools (Including Some From Before The 1st Century), and with Gatekeeper for a Procurement Reimagined podcast, Using AI to Streamline Procurement & Legal Processes. On the side, David writes about history and science for young people. He’s the author of an award-winning educational novel called The Jericho River — and of Secrets of Hominea. (You can learn more about David’s non-legal writing at his fiction website.) He is also a member of the Board of Advisors for the World History Encyclopedia, the world’s most-read encyclopedia about history.
Our Company
Tech Contracts Academy®, LLC offers training and tools to help companies, government agencies, lawyers, and contract staff do tech contracts better, faster, and with more confidence. We seek to bring clarity to this complex, ever changing area.
Tech Contracts Academy® uses David Tollen’s perennial American Bar Association IP bestseller, The Tech Contracts Handbook, as the foundation for its training and tools. We also rely on David’s forte for taking big, complex topics and making them simple, clear, and user-friendly.
