Gervaise Davis, Of Counsel to the Firm, was the founding principal of the internationally known Monterey, California, law firm of Davis & Schroeder, a boutique business and intellectual property firm, specializing in matters relating to protection, development and licensing of software for businesses and non-profits, as well as the complex legal issues arising from the Internet. Mr. Davis is an expert in copyright law, trademarks, domain names, trade secrets and intellectual property licensing. He has, for many years, advised multinational and domestic for profit and non-profit companies in these areas of the law. He serves as a frequent expert witness, mediator, or arbitrator in high tech litigation and dispute matters. He is an active arbitration panelist for the National Arbitration Forum, www.arb-forum.org, where he rules on disputed domain names under the ICANN/UDRP procedures. He was lead Counsel in several landmark domain name cases at the Federal Appellate level, such as Avery Dennison v. Sumpton, Avery Dennison Corp. v. Sumpton, 189 F.3d 868 (9th Cir. 1999) . He also served on the WIPO Domain Name Disputes Panel during the early stages of it. He is much in demand as a speaker on Intellectual Property law subjects and has served as an author and speaker for the Practicing Law Institute, NYC, for more than twenty years, principally on copyright and trademark matters. He also advises photographers on protection of their work under the copyright laws.
Mr. Davis is a member of the State Bar of California, as well as being admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court, the U.S. Tax Court, many of the U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeal, the Federal Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and numerous U.S. District Courts across the country. Mr. Davis has served as an Adjunct Professor of Law at Santa Clara University Law School, where he taught courses in Intellectual Property and the Internet in both the JD and Masters of Law programs. He graduated from Georgetown University Law Center, Washington, D.C., with his J.D., and also holds a B.S. in Foreign Service from Georgetown. He is the author of literally hundreds of articles in legal and business publications, in the area of copyrights, trademarks, Internet law and software licensing. In 1983, he authored one of the first books on the subject of protecting software, entitled Software Protection: Practical and Legal Steps to Protect and Market Computer Programs, now out of print. The book won several awards for excellence.