One of our companies Organic Motion is powering an awesomely cool exhibit at Seattle’s EMP Museum. By use of their marker-less computer vision platform, one can put themselves in the middle of James Cameron’s Avatar. Here is a great news report about the event including an intro from James Cameron, himself.

Also, here is an example of a person using the system to reenact a scene from Avatar.

Today, the University of Colorado Law School announced that Phil Weiser will be its next Dean. This is a tremendously good day for the law school and community.

Phil was previously a professor at the law school, the founder of the Silicon Flatirons and worked as a senior adviser for technology and innovation to the National Economic Counsel.

Alright, so what’s the big deal? Simple. I’ve spent a lot of time with Phil and I can confidently state that no academic leader is more innovative or thoughtful as Phil. In a time of turmoil for most law schools and their students, Phil is poised to bring his wealth of experience to evolving the law school into a truly great institution that is responding to the new world economy.

In addition, through his continued support of the Silicon Flatirons, all of Boulder can celebrate knowing that one of our central support hubs of the startup ecosystem will prosper for the foreseeable future.

A special thanks must given to outgoing dean David Getches whose leadership has brought the school to its current leadership position and has been an argent supporter of all things related to the Silicon Flatirons.

Congratulations Phil. This is an honor well deserved and I look forward to helping you in any way that I can.

Recently, the New York Times published an article called At Well-Paying Law Firms, a Low-Paid Corner. In short, the paper is reporting that some very well known firms are hiring lawyers at cut rate prices (less than half) of what associates on partner track are making at the firm. And these cheaper resources are performing the same services as their partner-track colleagues. This feels like a recipe for disaster to me.

I’ve known a few people who have positions like this at firms. Their names and the firms they work for will remain nameless, however in this post. In each case, the lack of transparency of how this arrangement really bothers me as a client.

First, how do the firms determine which work gets assigned to which group of associates? And does it differ depending on how busy the firm is? If I hire a firm to represent me in a financing, are the folks doing the diligence (which really is the most important part of a financing, not the documentation) sometimes partner-track folks and other times not? Do the clients have a right to decide?

And how are the firms billing out for these lower-cost resources? If they bill the same, it feels like I’m getting ripped off. If they bill less, then my bill will reflect that I’m be represented by the lower-paid people. While I think many junior associates aren’t worth what they are paid (but it catches up later), one does normally get what one pays for. I refuse to believe there is no quality difference in an associate making $160,000+ and one making $60,000.

I worry about mentorship and training, too. What incentive does a firm have to really train folks that aren’t on partner track and might not stick around long term?

Lastly, I would propose the theory that camaraderie is important to the concept of the law firm. Clients hire partners at law firms, but also the firms themselves. This includes the firm culture and the knowledge that client teams traditionally are near each other physically, not in outpost office where some lawyers are making less than have of their other colleagues.

While the reason for this shift was to help with escalating billing rates, I’m still perplexed why lawyers and accountants are the only professions that every year raise their rates. It doesn’t fit with the rest of the economy or their clients. Perhaps instead of creating a group of second-class citizens within the firm, they should pay attention to some of the things I prescribed in my law firm 2.0 series.

Dan Primack has a great article today called “The Private Equity Firm that Trusted Too Much.”

It’s the sad story of private equity firm General Atlantic taking the role of shareholder rep and in doing so, acquiesced to an $8 million dollar claim without doing any research to see if it was valid.

What next? Well, of course everyone ended up in court and there was a settlement. Read Dan’s article for the nitty gritty.

Why would anyone take this job? Your upside is that you get to work a lot for free and no one even takes you out to dinner to thank you.

Worse case is well…. this, getting sued (as I’ve done) or spending way too much time with lawyers.

This “public service announcement” brought to you by Shareholder Representative Services.*

(* Actually not brought to you by anything. I just like saying that since they are friends of mine and I’m an advisor to the company. But use them, anyways).

For anyone not familiar with mergers, if you sell a company, you rarely get the full purchase price at the closing. Some of it is usually held in an escrow account for a year or so to allow the buyer to see if there are any issues related to the acquired company that would entitle it to some of its money back. The deal might also be structured so that the purchase price is effectively paid in installments called earnouts based on how the company performs after closing. There are a million varieties of these formulas, and they can get very complicated very quickly.

In the past, there was little information about what the parties to a merger should expect related to these post-closing terms. Much of it is deal specific, but we still wanted to have some analytics around what happens in the marketplace on average. It just never existed.

Last week, Shareholder Representative Services released a study that is the first to do a deep dive on analyzing these questions and to give some insight on what actually happens. It goes into detail in investigating the issues around indemnification claims and eventual payouts. This is critical to understanding both the anticipated economics of a deal and how much total work you might expect before the transaction is fully behind you. This information is tremendously valuable to entrepreneurs, investors and buyers of companies and I believe it’s the first time it has ever existed. SRS is in a unique position to do this sort of analysis because of the high volume of escrows and claims that it manages.

The full study is only being made available to customers and business partners of SRS, but for a copy of the summary of the study, click here

Last Friday, I noticed a tweet from my friend Aziz Gilani (@texasvc) at DFJ Mercury:

“When asked questions by the audience, john doerr just filed groupon under ‘bubble’. The crowd roared! @rbpc2011″

Normally, the half-life of tweets are about 5 minutes for me (if that), but this one stuck in my head all weekend because it is wrong on a few levels.

First, I don’t think Groupon is a bubble, or indicative of a bubble. While I don’t have a ton of inside knowledge, from what I do know they are creating substantial profits at the company. I guess you could file Groupon next to Facebook, Twitter or Zynga if you are that cynical, but in each of these cases, there are real businesses here. What are reasonable valuations for these entities? No clue, I’m an early-stage investor, but profit is profit. And I don’t think any of these markets are fads.

Whether or not any of these companies are long-term successes, I don’t know (my guess is they will be), but these don’t look like bubble companies that I’ve seen in the past.

I think the term bubble referred to the Dot Com blowup a decade ago. Many of these bubble companies had no viable business models and were acquired or taken public due to hype. Many of these companies had negative margins for every good they sold. I’m sorry, but volume doesn’t help you here. (Note to self: shipping kitty litter is expensive).

And why be a hater Mr. Doerr or audience? In the case of Mr. Doerr, he is one of the most prolific investors of our time, so I’m not sure why he has to be negative. As momma used to say….

As for the audience, I’m not sure if this reaction was spurred by jealousy, or some desire to see the VC ecosystem do poorly, but all of us in the startup community should be rooting for our industry, whether or not we invested in these companies or not.

I wasn’t at the event, so perhaps I’m taking too much issue from a third-hand report in 140 characters or less, but this just hit me the wrong way.

To celebrate the 65th anniversary of the venture capital industry and the outstanding entrepreneurs that the venture capitalists have funded and supported, Xconomy, in partnership with the National Venture Capital Association and the MIT Museum, is organizing a conference and celebration to take place on April 6. Held in concert with the National Venture Capital Association’s Annual Meeting in Boston, Xconomy’s VC65: Celebrating the 65th Anniversary of Venture Capital in America will include more than 500 venture capitalist attendees at the NVCA Annual Meeting, as well as leading company founders, entrepreneurs and academics in the wider innovation community. There will be a lot of celebrating, informative panels and controversy, as I plan on shaking things up a bit on my panel.

If you want to come, the link is here.

Shareholder Representative Services is hiring a head of Northeast Business Development. Also, a director level corporate M&A lawyer.

Great company, great guys and a great idea. Here are the postings.

One of my absolutely favorite lawyers has started a blog: Reliance on Counsel.  It’s written by Rich Baer, currently the general counsel and chief administrative officer at Qwest Communications.  It’s going to be a must read for anyone wanting to see how one of the most innovative lawyers in the country thinks.  Rich has promised a level of candor and openness not seen today in other offerings.  It’s going to be much more than about law, but leadership, technology and common sense.

Rich is also in the middle of a job search as the merger between Qwest and CenturyTel closes soon.  I predict that he won’t be out of work for long, having recently won and award for Law Department of the Year.

Welcome Rich to the blogosphere!

Could the crowd be the answer to what ails our broken patent system?  Probably not for all the problems, but perhaps the crowd can put a stop to some meaningless patent lawsuits brought by patent trolls (er, excuse me. “Non Practicing Entities”).

A while ago, I wrote about Article One Partners.  They essentially use the crowd to find prior art for patents and other valuable research and evidence.  Here’s the basic concept: Article One uses crowdsourcing to tap into a global network of researchers to study the validity of patents that have been granted (which are often in litigation). You can read what I wrote about them last time here. One note of interest that came out of my conversations with Article One is the increasing number of times their solution is used to settle suits that come from licensing companies that do nothing but assert patents they have acquired.  And I believe that many of these patents are either of low quality or of the b.s. business method patent variety.  These are the folks that I like to call “patent trolls” or “destroyers of real innovation.”

This is particularly interesting as Article One announced this week that it has launched a new request for research of a patent held by Interval Licensing LLC. For those of you not aware, Interval asserted patent claims against major technology companies such as Apple, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, eBay and five others. One of the founders of Interval Licensing is Paul Allen, formerly of Microsoft.  Interesting to note that Seattle-based companies suchas Microsoft are missing from the assertion.  Also, as an aside, it makes me absolutely sick that he is behaving this way. Couldn’t he be more like Bill Gates and actually do something productive for the world with his wealth?

An Interval Licensing spokesman came out in the WSJ Digits blog to say, “I don’t take [Article One Partners’ crowdsourcing approach] to be a serious threat to our case.” I’m not so sure. The patent system is such a mess that someone in the crowd – maybe from here in Boulder, maybe from India – might just find the needle in the haystack.

So get involved.  If you are out there and have some skills in the area, click on the link and get to work.  Help make our patent ecosystem a little better and you can do well by doing good.

On a side note, I’m stoked about Articles One’s current success.  Good luck fighting the good fight and I wish you the best of luck against Interval Licensing LLC.