Victoria A. Cundiff is a partner at Paul Hastings resident in New York. She is a leader of the Litigation department’s global Trade Secrets practice, which is ranked in “Tier 1” by Legal 500 and is regularly named a “Leading Lawyer” nationally in the field by Legal 500. See www.legal500.com for criteria. She helps clients acquire, protect and maximize value from intellectual property. Her clients include emerging companies, joint ventures and Fortune 50 companies in a variety of industries, including software, media, financial services, insurance, pharmaceutical, chemical, marketing, and sales and distribution organizations. Much of her work focuses on issues arising at the intersection of intellectual property and employment law, including avoiding the loss of trade secrets and other valuable assets when key employees move between competitors, analyzing and litigating restrictive covenant and intellectual property ownership disputes, and designing confidential investigation procedures and verification protocols for resolving intellectual property use and ownership disputes outside of court.

Ms. Cundiff has tried intellectual property and related commercial disputes throughout the United States and before a variety of arbitration and mediation tribunals and has coordinated on such disputes internationally.  As important is her work to help organizations avoid litigation.  She writes extensively on intellectual property law issues, including “Preventing The Inevitable: How Thinking About What Might Happen Can Help Ensure That it Won’t,” “Reasonable Measures to Protect Trade Secrets in a Digital Environment,” and “How to Place Your Intellectual Property at Risk” and has contributed to the ICC Trade Secrets Task Force on Trade Secrets Legislation.  She is a frequent speaker on the implications of recent IP developments. She has served as an instructor in programs sponsored by the USPTO on trade secrets law for, among others, representatives of the governments of a variety of US trading partners. She has contributed to amicus curiae briefs filed in the United States Supreme Court on copyright and intellectual property licensing issues.

Ms. Cundiff is a Member of the American Law Institute, serving as an Adviser on the Restatement, Third, Conflict of Laws. She is a member of the Executive Committee of the New York State Bar Association’s Intellectual Property Section and is the past Chair of that section. She is Vice Chair of the Sedona Conference Working Group on Trade Secrets Law and is Vice Chair of the IPO’s trade secrets committee. She was an invited civilian guest at the U.S. Army War College National Security Seminar. She has been recognized in The Best Lawyers in America; Chambers; Legal 500; and New York Super Lawyers, among other lawyer directories.

Ms. Cundiff is a Visiting Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School, where she teaches intellectual property law, and the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches trade secrets law.

Ms. Cundiff received her B.A. degree from the University of Denver, where she was a Boettcher Foundation Scholar, and her J.D. degree from Yale Law School. She is on the advisory board of the Yale Law School Center for the Study of Corporate Law. She was a founding member of the Print Club of the City of New York.  She serves on the boards of the United States Senate Youth Program Alumni Association and the York Theatre Company in New York and has served as the Chair of the Yale Law School Executive Committee.