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Craig Grossman, Former Executive Director of the FedEx Institute of Technology, Joins Butler Snow Law Firm

Will Head Intellectual Property Practice Area

Memphis, TN (July 30) – Craig Grossman, formerly the Executive Director of the FedEx Institute of Technology at the University of Memphis, has joined Butler Snow, O’Mara, Stephens & Cannada, PLLC (Butler Snow) to lead the firm’s intellectual property practice area.

At Butler Snow he brings experience as a practicing attorney, a business executive and a law professor. Grossman also served as Law Clerk to Judge Alfred T. Goodwin of the U.S. Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit.

“The management of information and the development of intellectual property are essential to virtually every business, and executives must deal with matters they have never faced before,” Grossman said. “You do not need to be a biotech company or a film studio to have deep intellectual property and technology issues. If you are in logistics, advanced manufacturing or almost any other traditional business, you are in an information, knowledge-driven enterprise. Real estate and hard assets still matter as much as ever, but if you do not control the rights to the intellectual capital -- the data and knowledge at the core of your business, including the software, hardware and network on which it resides -- you do not control the business. If you do not maximize your legal rights to those intangibles, you are giving your competitors and vendors a gift.

“I’m excited about leaving the ivory tower and once again engaging directly with these issues,” he said.

Grossman also is excited about joining Butler Snow. “While at the FedEx Institute, I met Bob Morris, the leader of the Corporate and Securities Group. He impressed me with his commitment to stimulating the development of technology companies in the region. Later, when we began discussing my joining the firm, I became equally impressed with the firm’s commitment to building a world-class IP practice at Butler Snow. I have worked with a great many law firms before and can say without hesitation that the people, culture and commitment to client service at Butler Snow are extraordinary.”

After completing his clerkship with Judge Goodwin, Grossman joined the Los Angeles firm of Irell and Manella LLP where he practiced intellectual property for clients including AOL, Yahoo! and Disney. He then joined Scour, Inc., the leading multimedia search engine in its time, as Vice President Legal Affairs and General Counsel. He was quickly promoted to President and CEO, in which role he led a lawsuit of national prominence against all the major film studios and record labels and engineered a profitable reorganization and sale of the company. He served as a Visiting Professor of Law at Whittier Law School before joining the FedEx Institute, initially as Associate Director of Law and Technology, and the University of Memphis Law School as an Assistant Professor. Most recently, he served as Executive Director of the FedEx Institute of Technology, raising more than $6 million in corporate funds for university research in his tenure.

Grossman is a 1994 magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School. He earned concurrent B.A. and M.A. degrees in history at Stanford University where he received the Robert M. Golden Medal of Excellence in the Arts and Humanities and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa.

In recent years, he has served as a member of the Memphis Music Foundation Board, Tech Council for the Memphis Regional Chamber of Commerce and a Board Member of the Tennessee Supreme Court’s E-Filing Task Force. He currently serves as a director on the corporate boards of Lifeblood Biological Services LLC and Memphis Business Interiors, Inc.