Jeffrey R. Seul, Esq.
Jeff Seul is a corporate, mergers and acquisitions, and strategic transactions lawyer and chair of the firm's Technology & Telecommunications Industry Sector Group. He also serves on the firm's Directors Committee, which includes 27 partners from across Holland & Knight and is the policymaking body of the firm.
Mr. Seul has 30 years of experience working with emerging companies, investors, and strategic and financial acquirers. Mr. Seul advises clients on a wide range of corporate transactions and activities, including helping launch, finance and scale startups; helping financial and corporate strategic investors deploy capital; representing sellers, corporate acquirers and private equity buyers in mergers and acquisitions; and negotiating and structuring major commercial and intellectual property transactions, including joint ventures and other types of strategic alliances. He also regularly helps companies and investors in the United States conduct business overseas, companies and investors from other countries do business in the U.S., and handles cross-border mergers and acquisitions.
Mr. Seul has advised clients in many sectors of the tech industry, including artificial intelligence, blockchain platforms and applications, cloud computing and services, cybersecurity, digital media, enterprise systems and applications, gaming, Internet of Things, robotics, semiconductors, sharing economy platforms and services, social networks and virtual reality. An increasing percentage of his time is spent working with tech companies disrupting traditional industries and companies in traditional industries engaged in the digital transformation of their products, services and business models, including recent work in the autonomous transportation, digital health and financial technology (FinTech) domains. His emerging growth clients have been funded by top-tier venture capital firms and corporate strategic investors and have sold to leading tech companies.
Prior to joining Holland & Knight, Mr. Seul was vice president and general counsel of Groove Networks, a software company founded by tech industry pioneer Ray Ozzie and acquired by Microsoft in 2005. He has served on the boards of several companies, including C3 Technologies (acquired by Apple), Energy Materials Corp. and Movimento (acquired by Delphi Automotive, now Aptiv). Mr. Seul is a board leadership fellow of the National Association of Corporate Directors and a member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Venture Mentoring Service, a group of entrepreneurs who coach the founders of MIT-affiliated companies. He was an early contributor to the Model Document Working Group for the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA).
Mr. Seul serves as chairman of the Peace Appeal Foundation, an international nongovernmental organization that helps catalyze and support broad-scale peace and national dialogue processes to end or prevent wars. He is involved in the Peace Appeal Foundation's field work, has taught courses on negotiation and peacebuilding at Harvard for many years, and has published many articles in leading journals in the field. Earlier in his career, Mr. Seul served tech industry clients at law firms in San Francisco and Boulder, Colorado.