David Johnson has been teaching Negotiation at SLS annually since 2006, in conjunction with his full-time practice of law in Silicon Valley from 1996 to date.  He is a member of the California State Bar Executive Committee on Alternative Dispute Resolution, and its Education subcommittee.  His current research interest is in the burgeoning online education space.  He has testified before the California Senate on software issues, and appeared before the Congressional Subcommittee for Science and Technology as counsel for the Business Software Alliance.  In 2008, he returned to Washington to consult on the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade energy bill, HR2454, for Al Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection.  David also regularly provides lectures and seminars in the fields of negotiation, law and technology.  

David brings to his teaching a unique blend of breadth and depth in legal practice.  He began his career in the courtroom with some 20 civil trials, jury and bench, state and federal.  He has briefed and argued a dozen state appellate matters, with 6 opinions issued, including one state Supreme Court argument challenging the prima facie constitutionality of a sales tax on commercial speech.  He has litigated patent, copyright, trade secret, antitrust and business cases, and done corporate and IP licensing work in Silicon Valley while with Fenwick & West and Morgan/Lewis, representing an array of clients including Apple, Brøderbund, Cisco, Compuware, Electronic Arts, GoRemote, Intuit, McKesson, Merrill-Lynch, Realtor.com, Sankyo Pharma, and The Computer History Museum, pro bono.

He was General Counsel for a pioneer in the social media and online advertising space, AllAdvantage, Inc.  Thereafter, as GC and COO of a Palo Alto-based innovation accelerator, MG Taylor, Inc., he negotiated and closed its joint-venture with Vanderbilt Medical Center to create the nation’s first Healthcare Innovation Center, at Vanderbilt’s Center for Better Health.  David moved next into biotech as the Deputy General Counsel for Xenogen, Inc. (NYSE: XGEN), which implemented in vivo optical-imaging technologies for cancer research invented by Dr. Chris Contag, Stanford’s internationally-renowned Professor of Microbiology & Immunology.  He co-managed Xenogen’s merger into Caliper Life Sciences (NYSE: CALP), a global microfluidics and drug discovery instrumentation developer; upon closing, he became Caliper’s Deputy General Counsel for two years.  He then returned to the world of healthcare as a Principal and General Counsel at Triage Consulting Group, a national hospital revenue-cycle consultancy serving academic, children’s, non-profit and for-profit hospital systems across 35 states.  Currently, David is back on campus researching online education, including MOOCs (massive open online courses), and innovating the tools and design elements necessary to take his negotiation courses online.

David’s interdisciplinary research while at SLS examined the thesis that object-oriented modeling and fuzzy set theory, as proven design schemas, should therefore have useful applications portable to law and policymaking, eliciting from his faculty advisor the observation that he was "one of the most widely-read people I know."  In addition to reading, David is a competitive golfer and sailboat racer, and a diligent but decidedly average skier.