Richard C. Blake

Richard is chair of our IPOs & Equity Capital Markets practice group. He has represented public and private clients across a broad range of industries, as well as investment banking and venture capital firms. He has been lead counsel on IPOs listed in the Daily Journal “Top 10 IPOs” for four out of the last five years.

Richard has vast experience in preparing companies for IPOs, as well as counseling public companies and their boards on complex disclosure issues, fiduciary duties, board and committee governance and structure, board leadership, takeover defenses, board audits and self-evaluation processes, officer and director stock transactions, shareholder initiatives, proxy contests, risk oversight, conflicts of interest, relationships with stockholders and proxy advisory firms, compliance with legislative, regulatory, and listing rule requirements, and governance “best practices.”

Richard assisted as counsel to the New York Stock Exchange’s Commission on Corporate Governance, which issued its final report in fall 2010. He is a frequent speaker and presenter at conferences and panels including Stanford’s Rock Center for Corporate Governance, the National Investor Relations Institute, the Practicing Law Institute and NYSE Euronext. He was named in the 2017 edition of Legal 500 as a “key figure with expertise in preparing companies for IPOs” and was named a 2009 Northern California “Rising Star” by Law & Politics magazine. He is a director of the Silicon Valley Directors’ Exchange (formerly the National Association of Corporate Directors, Silicon Valley Chapter), and is on the advisory board of TheCorporateCounsel.net.

Richard is widely published and is co-author of “By the Numbers: Venture-backed IPOs” in 2013, 2015 and 2016 (2017 forthcoming), as well as a chapter on IPO readiness in the NYSE’s book The Entrepreneur’s Roadmap: From Concept to IPO and several chapters on IPOs and public company governance in the 2017 update to the widely-used treatise Venture Capital and Public Offering Negotiation.

Prior to joining the firm, Richard was a partner at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati.