|
During the course of Eric D. Tran’s diverse career, he has acted as General Counsel of a publicly listed Silicon Valley e-commerce company, an associate with two major international law firms, based in the US and Asia, and an enforcement attorney with the Securities and Exchange Commission. His experience also includes a clerkship with a federal judge.
Mr. Tran began his career at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett in New York City and later transferred to the Hong Kong and Singapore offices of the firm. While at Simpson Thacher, Mr. Tran’s practice focused on capital markets transactions of all types, including public offerings and private placements of equity, debt, and convertible securities, private equity investments, and cross-border mergers and acquisitions. Mr. Tran’s experience at Simpson Thacher included a number of representations of both issuers in the telecommunications industry and the underwriters of their securities. While practicing in Hong Kong and Singapore, and later Silicon Valley, Mr. Tran represented a broad range of clients, from large venture funds such as Richard Li's Pacific Century CyberWorks (now known as PCCW) and the state-linked Malaysian utility company, Tenaga Nasional Berhad, to smaller-capitalization companies such as the former Silicon Valley-based graphics chip maker, S3 Incorporated. While Mr. Tran’s practice evolved to include mergers and acquisitions and private equity investments, he continued to support clients in several major public offerings of equity and private placements of debt, including many by non-US issuers with Regulation S tranches.
In 2002, Mr. Tran returned to the United States from Asia to clerk for the late Senior United States District Court Judge William Matthew Byrne of the Central District of California in Los Angeles. Following that clerkship, Mr. Tran joined the SEC in New York City as an enforcement attorney charged with investigating and civilly prosecuting violations of the U.S. securities laws. He returned to Northern California in late 2004 to become General Counsel and Secretary of E-Loan, Inc., an online provider of mortgage and consumer loans that was a stand-alone public company until its acquisition by Popular, Inc. (of Puerto Rico) in late 2005. During his time as E-Loan's principal internal counsel, Mr. Tran not only successfully shepherded that company through its first-ever internal controls certification under Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, but also played an instrumental role in E-Loan's acquisition by Popular and in its subsequent re-structuring under Popular's principal North American operating company, Banco Popular North America.
Mr. Tran has extensive experience with the negotiation and drafting of a wide range of business and commercial contracts, particularly in the areas of technology licensing and secured debt financing, as well as with intellectual property issues (including the enforcement of patents and trademarks and the defense of patent infringement claims), employee relations, and the structuring of complex transactions, including asset dispositions and those involving Qualified Special Purpose Entities within the meaning of FAS 140.
California State Bar, admitted 1998.
New York State Bar, admitted 1997.
J.D., Harvard Law School, 1996, cum laude.
B.A., Stanford University, 1993, with distinction; Phi Beta Kappa.
|
