William T. Carlsen

Biography

William Carlsen represents businesses and their owners in disputes over what they have built — their brands, their confidential information, their contracts, their real property, and their stake in the companies they own. His practice covers trademark and trade dress infringement, trade secret misappropriation, unfair competition, and copyright claims, alongside breach of contract, business ownership and shareholder disputes, and litigation over the ownership and use of real property. He handles these matters in California state and federal courts, on appeal, and — for trademark portfolios — before the USPTO, where he responds to office actions and litigates registration and cancellation proceedings before the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board.

The cases William takes on are the ones that decide something: whether a company keeps the name it operates under, whether a departing employee walks away with the customer list, who controls a closely held business, who owns the building. Clients come to him at the point where the outcome will change how the business runs.

His approach is methodical before it is aggressive. He builds cases from the documents up, reads the record more carefully than the other side expects, and pressure-tests his own theory before he commits to it. Where the conventional argument does not get a client where they need to go, he looks for the one that will. He prepares every matter as though it will be tried, which is often what puts a client in a position to resolve it without trial.

William brings an unusually broad legal background to that work. He holds law degrees from both the United States and the United Kingdom — an LL.M. in Intellectual Property Law from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, an LL.B. from Bangor University Law School in Wales, and a B.A. from the University of Colorado — and he is admitted to practice in California, New York, Massachusetts, and the District of Columbia. Having lived, studied, and worked around the world, and having represented clients ranging from individual shareholders to companies with multi-billion-dollar capitalizations, he understands the range of positions a client can be in and what it takes to move them somewhere better, efficiently and on a timeline that fits the business.