Bio

Michael Dalton is a partner at Donahue Fitzgerald, where he focuses on business and corporate transactions. He also works on intellectual property matters, with an emphasis on trademarks. He represents a diverse business clientele, including retailers, real estate companies, and professional service providers. Michael has extensive experience in business acquisitions and dispositions, having drafted and negotiated numerous asset purchase, stock purchase, and merger agreements for clients in a variety of industries. He also has extensive experience in forming business entities, including corporations, partnerships, and limited liability companies, and in representing issuers and investors in debt and equity financings. His experience in serving as outside corporate counsel to a number of Bay Area companies, Michael handles a broad range of matters for both start-up and more seasoned companies, providing a broad range of legal services related to business ownership, operations and management, and drafting and negotiating employment agreements, incentive compensation plans, joint venture agreements, and a variety of other contractual matters. Michael has an active intellectual property practice emphasizing trademarks and unfair competition. He counsels clients on trade name and trademark selection and infringement issues and has prosecuted hundreds of federal trademark applications for both technology and nontechnology companies. He has negotiated and drafted numerous agreements involving trademark rights, including trademark licensing agreements and trademark coexistence agreements. Michael has practiced with the firm since 1984, becoming a partner in 1991. He received his law degree in 1984 from the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. During law school, he served as Supreme Court Editor of the California Law Review. He earned a Master of Arts degree from U.C. Berkeley in 1979 and a Bachelor of Arts degree from U.C. Berkeley in 1977. Michael is a member of the State Bar of California (Business Law and Intellectual Property Law Sections) and the Alameda County Bar Association, and sits on the Board of Directors of and serves as pro bono counsel to the Friends of the Oakland Public Library. He is conversant in several foreign languages. Since 1997, he has served on the firm’s management committee and is the firm’s former Managing Partner.