George Grellas

Founding Counsel
​For over 25 years, George has practiced business, corporate, commercial, and intellectual property law in Silicon Valley and has served as a business and corporate lawyer for a broad range of startup and business clients, from sole proprietorships to leading companies in the high tech field.

Experience

He has concentrated on helping entrepreneurs, founders, executives, and the companies they own and operate, in all types of industries. With respect to the tech field in particular, George has worked with start-ups in depth at every stage of their development: formation, founder arrangements, intellectual property protection, funding, technology licensing, strategic alliances, and acquisition. George functions as a key strategic adviser to start-up businesses and brings substantial experience and depth to that role. He has a direct style that appeals to entrepreneurs as well as a credibility that serves clients well in negotiations.

Atypically for transactional lawyers, George is also a skilled business and corporate litigation attorney who is experienced in corporate, contract, employment, fraud, trade secret, trademark, unfair competition, corporate dissolution, and other business lawsuits of all types. George began his career as a full-time business, corporate, and commercial litigator in San Francisco and has continued to offer skilled business litigation services to his startup and small business clients over the years in San Jose, Silicon Valley, and the broader San Francisco Bay Area. From contract damages lawsuits to business fraud lawsuits to injunction lawsuits, George has handled a broad range of such business lawsuits and disputes.

All this makes George highly versatile for start-up and small business transactional needs and business litigation matters. He has learned how to explain complex issues in simple terms and how to keep a strategic perspective amidst the many details involved in the matters in which he specializes. In his practice, George emphasizes long-term bonds of trust and loyalty with clients.

George received his B.A. in 1974 from the University of California at Santa Cruz with highest honors in history. He received his J.D. from the University of Santa Clara Law School in 1978, where he graduated magna cum laude and where he served as chief technical editor on the Santa Clara Law Review. George began his legal career as a law clerk for the Honorable William A. Ingram of the United States District Court for Northern District of California. After his federal clerkship, he served for four years as an associate attorney at the San Francisco law firm of McCutchen, Doyle, Brown & Enersen (now Bingham McCutchen), where he was a commercial litigator. Since 1984, he has specialized in serving start-up and small-to-medium-sized businesses in Silicon Valley where he founded and heads Grellas Shah LLP (formerly known as George Grellas & Associates).

George has consistently been recognized as a leading start-up business and technology lawyer in Silicon Valley. He is a member of the State Bar-CEB Business and Intellectual Property Law Advisory Committee and a frequent contributing author to leading CEB publications (Counseling California Corporations (3rd edition 2008); Advising California Partnerships (3rd edition 2009); California Business Law Practitioner, “Tips, Traps, and Strategies for Representing Early-Stage Startups” (Spring 2008)). He is also the author of many articles of wide-ranging interest, including those of direct interest to founders, entrepreneurs and their startups (see the Startup Law 101 Series of tutorials for founders and entrepreneurs, as found locally on this site or see our Resources page for an RSS feed to where the articles are posted on EzineArticles.com).

George recently served as President of the Sunnyvale-Cupertino Bar Association (2008-09) and has served on its board of directors for many years. He also serves as a member of the Santa Clara Bar Association and the State Bar of California.

George is also a classicist who has a fascination with words and word origins and who enjoys reading Latin and ancient and modern) Greek. He is an avid reader, a classical film buff, and an opera lover. He was born and raised in the midwest but has been a resident of the San Francisco Bay Area since 1968. He is married and serves as a deacon in his church.

Contact

20400 Stevens Creek Blvd.
Suite 280
Cupertino, CA 95014
Phone: (408) 255 – 6310
Fax: (408) 255 – 6350
Email: gg@grellas.com

Education

University of California, Santa Clara, J.D., 1978 (magna cum laude)

University of California, Santa Cruz, B.A., 1974 (highest honors in history)