Heather Meeker

Heather J. Meeker advises technology clients on intellectual property matters. Her practice focuses on counseling in the following areas:

• Technology transactions, including licenses, channel sales agreements, development agreements, university technology transfer, and consumer contracting
• Open source software licensing, including IP strategy, compliance, transactions, and disputes
• Technology and IP issues in mergers and acquisitions
• Copyright, patent, trademark, trade secret, and other IP matters

Heather has achieved national and international recognition for her leadership in the field of intellectual property law. Drawing on her technical knowledge and experience, she approaches matters with a practical and business focus.

Heather handles technology transactions and intellectual property-related aspects of mergers and acquisitions for companies in all technology sectors and for non-technology companies doing technology deals, with an emphasis on IT and software.

Prior to joining O’Melveny, Heather practiced at an AmLaw 20 firm, where she served as chair of the firm’s IP/IT Licensing and Transactions Group, as well as the co-managing shareholder of its Silicon Valley office.

Experience:

• Provided representation in open source disputes, including Oracle v. Google, Continuent v. Tekelec, and FSF v. Cisco.
• Participated in drafting team for Mozilla Public License version 2.0.
• Serves as advisor to the ALI project on the law of software contracting and the Restatement of Copyright Law.
• Provided counsel to many open source software and technology efforts, including Mozilla Foundation, Cloudfoundry.org, OROPO Foundation, Open Compute Project, and Open Networking Foundation.
• Authored “Open Source for Business,” a handbook for engineers, business persons, and lawyers to understand the use of open source licensing in private enterprise.

Admissions:

• California
• US District Court for the Northern District of California
• US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit
• US Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit

Education:

• University of California, Berkeley, J.D., 1994: Order of the Coif; Editor-in-Chief, Berkeley Technology Law Review (1993-1994)
• Yale University, B.A., Economics, 1979: magna cum laude

Member:

• Former Council Member, American Bar Association Science and Technology Section (2006 – 2010) and Former Chair, Open Source Committee, Section of Science and Technology Law
• American Law Institute (2006 – present)
• Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights for the San Francisco Bay Area (2006 – present)