Legal entrepreneurs: outlook improves for tech lawyers.

• Author: Cada, Chryss

Jeremy Makarechian, a lawyer for some of the state's most successful tech entrepreneurs, now runs his own one-man firm, E*Law, from an office in Westminster that he describes as "low overhead" and appropriate to his business plan. "Slow, high-quality growth in the client base and attorney base was what I believed then (in 1999), and believe now is the key to success for a technology law firm in Colorado," says Makarechian. He should know. He was the first associate hired in Colorado for one of the tech-bubble-economy's highest-profile technology law firms, Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison.

But Makarechian left Brobeck just before its explosive Denver growth became symptomatic of the San Francisco-based firm's eventual demise. "The path that Brobeck wanted me to take," Makarechian said, "was a recipe for disaster if the markets experienced a severe downturn." His bosses, he said, wanted to make the Colorado office more like its New York office, with expensive billable hours posted by a large number of attorneys. In the two-year period between 1998 and 2000, the number of Brobeck attorneys nationwide more than doubled, from 458 to 921. But by January 2003, Brobeck disbanded nationwide--leaving debt topping $90 million in its wake.

Makarechian and Brobeck's stories parallel what happened to other technology law firms in Colorado during the boom. But like the companies they represented, Colorado law firms that have been let down most gently by the deflation of the technology bubble were the slowest firms to be inflated in the first place. And now that the improving economy is stirring growth among Colorado's tech survivors, technology law is experiencing a Colorado revival as well.

For, where there is technology and new enterprise, there are bound to be legal needs. During the booming '90s, national law firms opened offices in Colorado to take advantage of the state's fast-growing technology market, and local firms created or ramped up existing technology-law departments. "For several years there was a gradual increase in technology developments, and therefore technology law," said John Soma, a professor of technology law at the University of Denver and the Colorado School of Mines and author of several articles and books on the subject. "Then in the late '90s we saw things really accelerate." Generally, technical law developed into three primary specialties: protecting intellectual property, transferring that technology to commercial applications...