Henry W. (Hank) Jones, III

Henry W. (Hank) Jones, III is a 26-year lawyer and businessperson who has served on the senior management teams of 3 publicly traded technology vendors in blended legal/business roles. He has worked at 6 companies in-house (i.e., as a full-time corporate employee/manager) throughout the U.S., and served part-time on the design/development teams for new products and services in software, e-commerce, i.t. outsourcing, business process outsourcing, peripherals, CD-ROMs, and other industry segments. As sole counsel for the first and largest insuror of i.t. vendors for the Southwest U.S., Hank handled 35 projects, analyzing failure causes and risk mitigation for a variety of technology products, services, and transactions. Hank has been a repeat guest speaker for the Project Management Institute, UT Austin McCombs Graduate School of Business, UT Law School, UT CLEE programs, UT Software Quality Institute, IEEE, Austin Software Council, and other regional and national engineering, business, and legal programs. His articles have appeared in dozens of publications. Before moving to Austin, Hank served as V.P., I.P. Development for U.S. Robotics (then a $3.5B revenue products developer/manufacturer/vendor). His open source processes and software work includes assisting vendors, investors, customers and others on strategy, new product design, risk management, licensing, intellectual property, product management, training, executive coaching, mergers, remediation, and other tasks. Current interests include best practices for and debugging geo-dispersed engineering teams, maturing and hybrid open source business models, managing “latency risks” caused by evolving business and legal standards arising after initial product/service design/development, optimized communications among corporate departments and “silos,” and optimized/intelligent contracting terms and processes. He graduated from Duke University magna cum laude and Vanderbilt Law School. He works nationally and offshore from an Austin base.