Alum Adam Tachner traces his path from junior IP associate to a senior business and legal role at AI chipmaker Groq Inc. Adam shares how his unrelenting curiosity about his clients’ businesses, and cultivation of a deep professional network in the tech community, have contributed to his ability to “see around corners” at the leading edge of tech across a 30-year career. ----more---- Transcript: Intro: Welcome to the Reed Smith podcast, Career Footprints. In each episode of Career Footprints, we'll ask our guest for Reed Smith alum to share their career story, how their time at Reed Smith set them up for success and their advice for early career lawyers. Our goal is to surface insights from inspiring professionals careers that will help you find your professional success however you define that.  Alicia: Welcome back to Career Footprints, our podcast series at Reed Smith, looking at or listening to the incredible career stories, the career footpaths of our amazing alumni. I'm Alicia Millar and I am delighted to welcome my next guest that is Adam Tachner with the most impressive job title I have to say that possibly the largest uh business card you'll ever find. So VP Corporate Development, Finance and Chief Legal Officer over at Groq. Adam, welcome. Adam: Thank you so much. You know, they say that the shorter your title, the greater the power. So don't be impressed.  Alicia: Well, I still am, but thank you. I still am. Welcome. Absolutely, Welcome to our podcast. I can't wait to share your career journey uh with our listeners and especially the times that you're going to be talking about your experiences at Reed Smith or actually Crosby Heafey, as I understand. So, not necessarily full on Reed Smith, but don't let me talk about it. I'd love to hear more about you. Talk us through it.  Adam: Sure. It's, uh, so, first of all, it's a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. It's, uh, it's a little humbling to realize I've reached that stage in my career where I have to spend some time reflecting uh backwards. Uh I tend to focus more on what's next and what's come to pass. So I appreciate the moment to take a breather and look back. I, I actually grew up around the law in a sense, not big law, but my father was a, was a patent attorney uh who came to it relatively late in his own career. He went to night school in the seventies. He had been an engineer on the Apollo program in the sixties and, and then became a patent attorney because he was an engineer who could write. And um and so he had this great solo practice that he really enjoyed and probably wanted me to follow in his footsteps. But, but when I went to law school and saw what was going on in Silicon Valley, I was really inspired after leaving University of Oregon or even before I finished, actually, I did my third year at what was then the Hastings College of Law, uh the UC Law School in San Francisco. And uh got a 2L job which extended into a full year internship at a little patent boutique in San Francisco. And they knew uh an attorney at Crosby Heafey and they referred me over and he brought me into this kind of nascent intellectual property team and I was really uh honored and privileged to be kind of a, a co founding member of that group. There were maybe three or four of us. They had maybe a year or two under their belts thus far and, and then had some opportunities to help bring in clients and sort of build practice  Alicia: Amazing. And that sort of first time in, um, in Crosby Heafey, what was it like, sort of walking in? What was your sort of first year or two? Like, what was that sort of moment of, you know? Oh, my goodness I'm here, I'm a patent attorney, New practice. Ok. Where's the deep end? Am I jumping in?  Adam: Yeah. Well, you know, joining Crosby Heafey at that time was actually a wonderfully, uh, stimulating set of circumstances because it was a, a good size firm as they went. Uh, at the time, we were not a boutique, but, you know, a spec