Overview

Bert Lathrop is an attorney in Holland & Knight's Newport Beach office. Mr. Lathrop began his legal career after two previous distinguished careers in information technology (IT) management, and business development / mergers and acquisitions (M&A) consulting.

Mr. Lathrop is an integral part of a complex business litigation team, with experience in resolving disputes across a range of matters, including copyright infringement, securities fraud, oil and gas rights, water rights and transactional contract rights. He also has experience in creating value through transactional law, including emerging company formation and financing, technology transactions, technology services outsourcing, software and software as a service (SaaS) licensing, intellectual property (IP) matters, and cybersecurity data sharing with respect to ownership rights and privacy.

Mr. Lathrop has held executive leadership positions in Big 4 consulting, large Silicon Valley infrastructure technology providers and financial services firms. He has advised Global 100 corporations and large private equity firms, with a focus on the impact of M&A transactions on IT. In his last assignment before law school, he co-founded a cybersecurity firm whose mission was to compile and publish threat intelligence data for internet security. In this role, Mr. Lathrop held the positions of chief operating officer (COO) and chief customer officer.

While attending law school, Mr. Lathrop completed a Business Law concentration, leveraging his extensive experience in business administration matters. He received CALI Excellence for the Future Awards for best student performance in Mediation; Research Seminar in Law, Business & Economics; Legal Ethics; Business Associations Law; Startup Legal Garage; Research Seminar in Technology, Democracy, and Security; and Intellectual Property Law – Statutory Interpretation.

In support of his global technology and business consulting career prior to law school, Mr. Lathrop attended graduate business school, graduating at the top of his class with an MBA degree conferred by three global institutions: New York University, Stern School of Business; London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE); and HEC Paris.

Mr. Lathrop is a citizen of the United States and France, and uses his multicultural background while assisting his clients, domestic and international.

Representative Experience

  • Represented a Delaware corporation in connection with a dispute involving a deposed director and his corporate attorney with respect to a fraudulent, self-dealing issuance of stock
  • Represented corporate directors of a Delaware corporation in connection with a claim by the beneficiaries of a deceased director's will; claimants argued that the directors had breached their fiduciary duties and that the corporation had breached its compensation contract for having failed to issue certain stock to the deceased director
  • Represented a California-based family in connection with an oil and gas lessee's failure to compensate the family members under the lease; researched the ownership rights of the parcels included in the lease, including more than 100 real estate transactions over nearly a century
  • Represented a California agricultural business in connection with its dispute with a neighbor over water rights previously agreed in a settlement agreement; investigation included claims of illicit well drilling, measure of relative impact of wells to spring flows, and measure damages to crops
  • Represented a private, for-profit institution of higher education in connection with its desire to protect its rights with respect to a civil litigation matter in which one of its founder-directors was a named party
  • Represented a daily print publication in multiple copyright infringement claims brought against it for the materials used by its advertisers in violation of content owners' rights
  • Represented the co-trustees of a revocable family trust in their dispute with beneficiaries of the trust who claimed that the valuation a closely held corporation owned by the trust was unsupported by the evidence and therefore invalid
  • Represented a construction equipment dealership in its defense against a negligence claim related to its assistance in obtaining credit on a customer's behalf and in its counterclaims for fraud and breach of contract against that plaintiff

  • Represented an upstart robotics company in connection with due diligence research to substantiate clear ownership of its intellectual property, including trademarks and proprietary trade secrets
  • Represented an upstart legal tech / artificial intelligence (AI) company in connection with the drafting of its software as a service (SaaS) licensing agreement form with particular focus on its own derivative works rights based on data submitted to it for analysis by its own clients
  • Represented an upstart AI company in its quest to comply with U.S. and European privacy laws in its management of customer data and in its SaaS licensing documents
  • Translated multiple non-disclosure and financial technology (FinTech) service agreements from English to French on behalf of a global FinTech service provider entering French-speaking African countries
  • Represented a global private equity firm based in London in its due diligence review of the technology licensing and service contracts of a global financial services subsidiary that it was targeting for acquisition
  • As chief operating officer of a cybersecurity services company, performed due diligence review and analysis of a large volume of SaaS service agreements in connection with the delivery of digital publication services to Global 1000 companies and to federal and state governmental entities
  • As senior vice president of a large U.S.-based financial services organization, negotiated a variety of multimillion-dollar hardware, software, SaaS, service outsourcing and support services contracts

  • Represented an upstart artificial intelligence (AI) company in its quest to comply with U.S. and European privacy laws in its management of customer data and in its software as a service (SaaS) licensing documents
  • Represented an upstart robotics company in connection with its formation as a Delaware corporation, the drafting of its corporate bylaws and the issuance of initial convertible debt financing
  • Represented an upstart legal tech / AI company in connection with the drafting of several of its non-disclosure form variants

Credentials

Education
  • University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, J.D., Business Law, magna cum laude
  • New York University, Leonard N. Stern School of Business, MBA, Business Administration
  • London School of Economics and Political Science, MBA, Business Administration
  • HEC Paris, MBA, Business Administration
  • Excelsior College, BSc, Computer Information Systems, summa cum laude
Bar Admissions/Licenses
  • California
Memberships
  • Hastings Law Journal, Senior Note Editor, 2018-2020
Honors & Awards
  • Holland & Knight Pro Bono All-Star, 2021
  • Order of the Coif, 2020
  • Hastings Honor Society, University of California Hastings College of the Law, 2018-2020
  • Thurston Society, University of California Hastings College of the Law, 2019-2020
  • Albert G. Evans Scholarship in Private Enterprise, University of California Hastings College of the Law, 2020
Spoken Languages
  • French

Publications

News