Linda Alvarez

My legal career spans 14 years, specializing in the areas of trademarks, copyrights, and advertising practices. For the major portion of my career, I have practiced in large firms - Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati (Palo Alto, CA) and Vinson & Elkins (Houston, TX) - where I represented multi-national corporations in clearance, enforceability, establishment, prosecution, and maintenance of trademark rights, copyrights, advertising practices, and issues related to the conduct of online business.

More recently, I practice solo. My clients include best selling authors, filmmakers, and businesses from sole-proprietorships to corporations with internationally recognized consumer brands.

Before becoming an attorney, I enjoyed a successful career in the Arts. As an attorney, I have stayed involved in the Publishing, Arts & Entertainment Industries, working with film companies, authors, screen-writers, theatre companies, performers, and visual artists on a wide variety of matters that arise from creative endeavors and collaborations including, digital delivery of content and the myriad agreements associated with film production.

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The first twenty years of Linda Alvarez’s professional life were spent pursuing a successful career in the Arts. Trained in theatre, she and her husband produced and managed theatrical and media productions across the U.S. Her skills extended to performing, writing, directing, and designing shows for stage and screen.

In the mid-nineties Linda reentered the academic world obtaining her law degree and entering private practice, the majority of which has been in large firms – Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati (Palo Alto) and Vinson & Elkins (Houston) – where she represented multi-national corporations in matters concerning trademark rights, copyrights, advertising practices, and issues related to the conduct of online business.

Beginning with her engagement as a member of the team successfully defending the first mp3 player to come to market (against aggressive challenge brought by the Recording Industry Association of America) Linda has remained active on the legal frontier where digital technology and Internet practices push the boundaries of legal concepts designed for the analog and print-based era.

As Senior Counsel for Litigation and Trademarks for Align Technology, Inc., Linda managed major litigations on behalf of the corporation as well as shepherding the company’s valuable consumer trademark portfolio. With the successful conclusion of the litigations, Linda chose to re-focus her career toward the Arts and launched her solo practice. Her client list includes best selling authors, filmmakers as well as businesses from sole-proprietorships to corporations with internationally recognized consumer brands.

Living a fusion of highly creative and highly analytical lifestyles provides Linda a unique outlook, leading her to merge intentional thinking and creative reflection into the practice of law. The result of this fundamental shift in approach is the creation of a new model for effective and powerful legal practices. This innovative approach enables creative and socially conscious entrepreneurs and enterprises to harmonize and align the way their legal affairs are conducted with their principles and vision for a just and sustainable world. The model, which she calls ‘Discovering Agreement’, bridges the gap between vision and action, and between values and system. Using it, parties can take the reins and build their own ideal systems within the context of the larger conventional legal-justice system, actively transforming how the conventional system impacts their present and future interactions and dealings.

As a speaker and trainer, Linda brings the Discovering Agreement model to a broad spectrum of audiences including, most recently, presentations for lawyers at Thomson Reuters’ Minneapolis headquarters and for artists and legal practitioners at the first annual Wild Goose Festival of Spirituality, Justice, Art and Music in North Carolina.

A member of the International Academy of Collaborative Professionals and a Thought Leader member of Social Venture Network (an organization that supports and inspires business leaders and social entrepreneurs in expanding practices that build a just and sustainable economy), Linda works with lawyers and non-lawyers alike. The work empowers them to engage conventional systems and paradigms in a way that generates immediate, positive change in their daily interactions and legal dealings while, simultaneously, catalyzing long-term, systemic change. Through the work and in Linda’s practice (both as an attorney and as a business consultant), Discovering Agreement has transformed negotiation, drafting, performance and enforcement of contracts involving major publishing houses and literary agencies, as well as major corporations such as, Deloitte, Thomson Reuters, and OWN (Oprah Winfrey Network) — among others.