Harold J. Slawik
Harold is a business attorney with over 25 years’ experience working for and representing early stage technology companies.
Harold co-founded New Counsel, PLC in early 2006 with John Roberts. His practice is focused on investment transactions, mergers and acquisitions, and general corporate matters. He has represented clients in over 50 seed and early-stage funding transactions over the last five years ranging from $100K to $15M. He also does significant work on technology and software licensing transactions and general corporate matters.
Harold’s first startup experience began in 1995 with Ensodex, Inc., a database networking software developer located in St. Paul, Minnesota. Harold worked as General Counsel and as a business development executive. He then joined Diba, Inc. of Menlo Park, California, as General Counsel in 1996. Diba was a high-profile startup company creating embedded applications for consumer products, including early systems and applications for web browsing from the TV screen. Harold had direct responsibility for over $10M in investment funding and transactions with major consumer electronics companies such as NEC, Zenith, Mitsubishi, Thompson, Alcatel, and Sony. Diba was sold to Sun Microsystems in 1997 for approximately $50M dollars. After the acquisition Harold worked as a corporate attorney for Sun Microsystems focusing on semiconductor technology and software licensing transactions.
Harold left Sun Microsystems in early 1998 to co-found Niku Corporation, an enterprise applications software developer. As Sr. Vice President of Corporate Development, Harold helped Niku secure $75 million in private equity, and had direct responsibility for 7 company acquisitions with valuations from $5M to $125M. Niku went public in February 2000 at a $2.4B market capitalization and raised over $220M, making it one of the 20 largest technology IPO’s in the 1995 through 2000 time period.
Harold received a B.A. from the University of St. Thomas in 1982 majoring in philosophy. In 1988 he received a J.D. from the William Mitchell College of Law where he was on law review and was an academic scholarship winner. Harold is admitted to practice before the federal and state courts of Minnesota.
Harold is married and has three grown children. He resides in Bloomington and enjoys fly fishing in his spare time.