Bruce Abramson holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Columbia and a J.D. from Georgetown. He was the President of Informationism, Inc., a San Francisco-based consultancy that helps an international clientele understand the law, the policies, the economics, and the strategic uses of patents, copyrights, and other forms of intellectual property. He also has extensive experience conducting antitrust analyses, damages, remedies, and valuation analyses in both litigation and regulatory settings.
Bruce is an expert in the law and economics of technology, with a particular emphasis on the Internet, software, and the still-emerging world of digital content. He engages these issues from a variety of directions, some research-oriented and others quite practical. His current practical interests center around providing companies, industries, and countries with the legal and analytical assistance needed to navigate the transition to the information age. His current research interests focus on identifying the legal, regulatory, and policy barriers to effecting this transition smoothly.
As a consultant, he provides his clients with a combination of business, legal, and technical advice, as appropriate to meet their specific needs. His practice combines counseling and expert support across a range of technology law issues, including computer and software patents, digital copyrights, and antitrust challenges, as well as more standard contract and business tort cases. He has helped clients assess appropriate technologies, navigate regulatory proceedings and lawsuits, and develop internal corporate policies, in the tech sector and beyond. He is particularly interested in challenges that involve rethinking policies or strategies to accommodate the information age.
As a researcher, he is widely published in the scholarly literature of Computer Science, Management Science, and Law. The contribution in this area of which he is proudest, however, is the one that he directed to a general audience. Digital Phoenix: Why the Information Economy Collapsed and How it Will Rise Again (MIT Press, 2005) tells some of the information economy’s most exciting formative stories—or rather retells them in a manner that shows how they interconnect and what they portend for the future. He wrote Digital Phoenix to help anyone whose interest was piqued by the Internet investment bubble, the Microsoft trial, the rise and fall of Napster, or the sudden emergence of open-source software, make sense of our unfolding information economy.
He has extensive experience in the academic, business, and legal realms. He has served on the faculty of the University of Southern California and as a research adjunct to the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University. His consulting clients have included Fortune 500 companies, major research universities, and some of the nation’s largest law firms. He has won multiple research grants and contracts; advised federal agencies, startup companies, and educational foundations; published over three dozen scholarly articles; presented more than fifty invited lectures; and served on the editorial boards of several journals. And he spent a year as a Law Clerk to the Hon. Arthur J. Gajarsa of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.