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ALC's Founder, Charles D. Chalmers , was a partner with San Jose based Skjerven, Morrill, MacPherson, Franklin & Friel, a firm specializing in intellectual property matters as well as business litigation. A 1971 graduate of Stanford Law School, he has practiced in the field of business litigation for 27 years, and focused on intellectual property matters for the last 10 years. He has conducted more than 25 trials as the responsible attorney, and handled numerous appeals in state and federal court. In recent years he has worked on patent, trademark, trade secret and software copyright cases for clients including NEC Corporation, AMD, Mosel-Vitalic, Novellus, Spectradyne, PeopleSoft and QuickLogic. He has also handled securities and business contract litigation. He has served as a temporary judge of the San Francisco Superior Court, acquiring a valuable appreciation of how judges and juries see a case. Mr. Chalmers approaches litigation in a manner aptly summarized by Judge Michel of the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, during the argument of an appeal: "I must say Mr. Chalmers, I hugely appreciate your candor in not fighting over things that you don't need to fight over and don't fight over. We so often have attorneys who expand the scope of dispute by quarrelling with everything that the other side has said, everything suggested by the court and it sometimes greatly and unnecessarily complicates our work. I very much appreciate your candor and your willingness not to fight about everything and to fight where you need to fight." |