Tom Giaccherini resides in Carmel Valley, the heartland of the Monterey Peninsula on the Central California Coast. This agricultural region is situated about 100 miles south of San Francisco & Silicon Valley, and is bordered by the Santa Lucia Mountains, the Ventana National Wilderness and Big Sur. Tom’s law practice is focused on the cultivation, creation and protection of intellectual property assets for the telecommunications, software and entertainment industries.
Mr. Giaccherini took his undergraduate degree from Brown University in1978, and earned his law degree from the University of Connecticut in 1980. After three years of private practice at Parmelee, Johnson, Bollinger & Bramblett in Stamford, Connecticut, Mr. Giaccherini served as a Corporate Patent Attorney for the Hughes Aircraft Company in Los Angeles. His duties at Hughes included the composition and prosecution of patent applications, licensing, litigation, government contracts, and the development of invention disclosures. He was also part of a Hughes technology transfer team which was charged with task of commercializing aerospace technology for General Motors, which acquired Hughes in 1985. In addition to managing all outside counsel for the Hughes Patent Department, Mr. Giaccherini initiated a training program for patent engineers.
Before founding the law practice in 1988, he was Corporate Counsel for the Space & Technology Group of TRW Inc. in Los Angeles. At TRW, Mr. Giaccherini initiated a licensing and infringement monitoring program for the company's portfolio of over 400 granted patents spanning the fields spacecraft design, telecommunications systems, microelectronics and semiconductor fabrication, lasers, antenna systems, microwave devices, software and algorithms, encryption, artificial intelligence and signal processing.
As a member of the Programmable Machines & Processes Committee of the American Intellectual Property Law Association, Mr. Giaccherini participated in the drafting of the Semiconductor Chip Protection Act of 1984, which serves as the statutory basis for the federal registration of the design of integrated circuits. He also served as the General & Patent Counsel for the Laser Association of America. Mr. Giaccherini has made over 500 presentations to corporate groups describing intellectual property and strategies for maximizing the business value of intellectual property assets.
Mr. Giaccherini is admitted to practice before the bars of the States of California and Connecticut, and the United States Patent and Trademark Office. He is has also been admitted to the bars of fourteen federal district and appellate courts, as well as the bar of the Supreme Court of the United States. He is a member of the Peninsula Intellectual Property Law Association, the San Francisco Patent and Trademark Law Association, the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco, and the Churchill Club of Palo Alto. His current avocations are inventing, hiking in Big Sur, and caring for an Olive Grove and a Vineyard of Merlot Grapes.