Office

Los Angeles

Los Angeles isn’t just home to glitz and glamor. Creativity drives the Los Angeles area’s innovation and growth, earning it accolades as one of the largest startup ecosystems in the United States.

Gunderson Dettmer is at the forefront of this rapid growth. Our Los Angeles office, conveniently located off the 405 in the Playa Vista neighborhood, opened in 2012. In the decade since, we’ve grown to dozens of lawyers representing hundreds of companies and funds impacting a variety of industries, including SaaS, fintech, retail and e-commerce, CPG, new media, web3, life sciences, food tech, healthtech and everything in between.

Our decades focused on these dynamic industries have taught us how to see around corners—and because we’ve seen issues play out before, we can provide our clients with the practical advice and technical skill they need to scale up.

Our company clients range from unfunded startups to public companies. Venture-backed clients represented by our Los Angeles team have an aggregate valuation of over $11 billion and rely on us for the full range of corporate and transactional services. We also represent dozens of venture capital funds in connection with fund formation and fundraising, portfolio investments, operations and tax. Our Los Angeles licensing, strategic partnering and commercial transactions team provides companies with critical transactional advice related to protecting and monetizing their intellectual property assets, negotiating commercial transactions and other operational matters.

PitchBook has ranked Gunderson Dettmer as the top law firm globally for eight years in a row, and we are consistently recognized as a leader in California. Since 2020, the Los Angeles office closed more than 300 financings for company and venture fund clients, totaling more than $4 billion raised for innovative companies in the region.

OUR WORK

Our Los Angeles-based team focuses on the following practice areas:

Company Representation: Forming, Scaling & Maturing

  • Entrepreneurs and emerging company representation
  • Pre-venture, venture and growth equity financings for private companies
  • Corporate governance and strategy for private and public companies
  • Licensing, strategic partnering and commercial transactions
  • Life sciences licensing and strategic partnering transactions
  • Data privacy and compliance issues
  • Labor and employment issues for companies and funds
  • Mergers and acquisitions, both sell-side and buy-side

Fund Representation: Accessing & Deploying Capital

  • Venture capital and growth equity fund formation, operations and compliance
  • Venture capital fund portfolio investments
  • Growth equity fund investments, both early-stage and late-stage

The team also works seamlessly with practitioners in other offices to provide clients with world-class support for:

  • Executive compensation needs for private and public companies
  • Debt financing and secured transactions
  • IPOs and direct listings
  • Capital markets and ongoing public company representation
  • Antitrust and CFIUS issues
  • Tax issues

BEYOND THE WORK

We boast a deep bench of talent to help cultivate and grow the companies of tomorrow. Our Los Angeles team includes Mike Heath, named a Next Generation Partner by Legal 500, and Tim Greene, recognized by Chambers as “Up and Coming” in the Tech Transactions category. Other attorneys regularly teach, speak and lead programs at UCLA and USC.