LeighAnn Weiland is a Supervising Attorney in Santa Clara University School of Law’s Entrepreneurs’ Legal Advising Clinic, where student volunteers working with senior attorneys meet with and advise business owners and entrepreneurs about their business legal issues.

LeighAnn practices law as an Interim General and Corporate Counsel with over 30 years of experience providing practical and fearless legal counsel to Silicon Valley management teams and enterprise-level executives across multiple businesses and product lines.

LeighAnn graduated from California State Polytechnic University with a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and a minor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. She earned her J.D. at the University of La Verne School of Law.

LeighAnn began her career as a junior engineer with the U.S. Navy Metrology Engineering Center, then moved to TRW, Inc. (now Northrup Grumman), where she negotiated and managed multi-billion-dollar aerospace and defense contracts for the U.S. Department of Defense, the CIA, and the NSA. She then moved to the then start-up ESRI, Inc., and later, was hired by Caltech to teach classes in intellectual property law on campus while managing the Office of Patents and New Technology at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She was instrumental in bringing space technology to commercial applications in GPS, medical devices, and optics.

After her time with Caltech, LeighAnn was hired as a Senior Corporate Counsel at Hewlett-Packard Company and tasked with monetizing and commercializing over 80,000 US and foreign patents owned by HP. She led an internal team of volunteers that created HP’s first commercial 3D Printer, among other accomplishments.

More recently, LeighAnn held the position of Vice-President and General Counsel of ABBYY – a Moscow, Russia-based multinational technology and document management enterprise comprising 21 companies operating in eleven countries. Her leadership and litigation management successfully defended ABBYY in a significant patent and trademark infringement lawsuit brought by Nuance Corporation and prosecuted by three major Silicon Valley law firms.

LeighAnn is a member of the State Bar of California and is authorized to practice before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as an Attorney. She is a member of the San Francisco Bay Area Intellectual Property Inn of Court, the Silicon Valley Association of General Counsel (SVAGC), and the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP).