Former Internet professional/webmaster now assisting clients with legal issues related to the digital age. Particular expertise advising, litigating, speaking, and writing on issues affecting Internet intermediaries, as well as experience with copyright/intellectual property, free speech, privacy, and other innovation policy matters.
Thanks to an early interest in journalism and mass media that morphed into a career in technology, with an equally long-standing interest in protecting the freedom that makes them possible, Cathy is now a lawyer specializing in the convergence of technology and civil liberties. Her practice includes advocacy and counsel related to copyright/intellectual property, free speech, privacy, and other innovation policy matters affecting technology use and development, with a particular focus on how these issues interact with Internet platforms and how the law affecting platforms also affects the public.
Prior to becoming a lawyer Cathy worked as a webmaster in Silicon Valley and France. In most of her positions she sat at the intersection between those developing technology and those developing the businesses around the technology, translating the needs of both constituencies into this new web-based communications medium. Despite the satisfaction of working hands-on with new technologies to create new products and services, she decided to switch gears and go to law school when she became alarmed by the state of the law surrounding technology use and development. People who did not understand how technology worked, or how people used it, were nonetheless regulating it. She understood both, not only from her professional experience but also her from her mass communications and sociology double major at the University of California at Berkeley, where her honors thesis studied Internet adoption patterns. She became a lawyer, earning her J.D. at Boston University with a concentration in intellectual property, in order to help ensure that innovation and the public interest could be best protected.