Matthew Carden
Attorney and Software Expert
949-677-8398   mcarden at cardenassoc.com

Overview

I provide software and networking expertise to clients engaged in patent litigation.

Technical Expertise

Prior to law school, I spent 17 years in the software industry in roles including Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Principal Engineer, Software Architect, and Vice-President of Product Strategy. I hold a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and also studied Computer Science at Princeton University. My employers have included Hewlett-Packard (where I designed network management products), Perspecta (an information visualization offshoot from the MIT Media Lab co-founded by Nicholas Negroponte), Open Market (an early e-commerce provider), and Network General (where I worked on the original "Sniffer" network analyzer). In 1999, with several partners I helped create an online marketplace called Ithority which was purchased by FreeAgent.com in 2000. Following the sale of this company, I worked as a technical expert for several Bay Area venture capital firms, twice serving as CTO of ventures being incubated. While at Chess Ventures from 2001-2003, I traveled widely to perform on-site evaluations of startups in Los Angeles, Chicago, Orlando, New York, and London: meeting staff, reviewing source code, examining server facilities, and discussing future product directions.

Legal Background

I graduated from Duke Law School in 2007, magna cum laude and Order of the Coif (top 10%). I then worked as an associate attorney at Irell & Manella, LLP, where I managed ten software experts across several patent infringement cases. I am licensed to practice law in California.

Focus of My Practice

While I do not work primarily as an attorney per se, I specialize in projects that involve a combination of technical and legal issues. I deliberately confine my services to technologies I understand well based on my technical background. Services I have provided to clients include: Because most patent litigation is backward-looking to the period of invention, I can often bring to bear a direct recollection of the state of the art from my own participation in the field in the relevant time period, and an intuitive sense of what was obvious at the time (and where to look for supporting documentation). In addition, the network of contacts formed during my career in Silicon Valley helps me in locating hard-to-find prior art and in identifying the right individuals to answer very specific technical questions—individuals who may be too busy running a company today to advertise themselves as experts. I loved writing code and wrote over 100,000 lines of it in my career (in C, C++, Java, assembly, etc.), so I am generally fluent in understanding code written by others.