Fenwick’s Michael Esquivel Honored Among California’s Top 100 Lawyers for Fourth Consecutive Year
Fenwick corporate partner Michael Esquivel has been named among the top 100 lawyers in California by the Daily Journal for the fourth consecutive year.
The legal publication’s annual Top 100 list honors lawyers doing cutting-edge legal work.
Esquivel provides strategic counseling to both emerging and high-growth companies, handling all aspects of general corporate and corporate securities law. He also represents venture capitalists and investment banks that are fueling innovation in the healthtech, consumer and enterprise tech, social networking, software, and cloud computing industries.
The publication highlighted some of Esquivel’s noteworthy work over the past year, including his representation of companies in the digital health sector, which has seen rapid growth in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Esquivel, considered one of the top startup and venture capital lawyers in Silicon Valley, is particularly active in digital health and healthcare IT,” the Daily Journal wrote in its profile of Esquivel.
Discussing the digital health industry’s 2020 growth, Esquivel said: “We always talked in the digital health ecosystem about the convenience benefit of a lot of these technologies, but for the first time, safety became a massive driver of adoption. The notion that you could manage a non-urgent disease condition outside of a hospital or doctor’s office and avoid subjecting yourself and your family to a potential COVID infection was a huge accelerant to digital health.”
Esquivel’s recent work in the digital health and life sciences space has included guiding Freenome, a biotechnology company that pioneered a comprehensive multiomics platform for early cancer detection, in its $270 million Series C and $160 million Series B; representing Omada Health, a digital care company that inspires and engages people to achieve their health goals, in its acquisition of Physera; and handling an $88 million Series B for Calm, an app for sleep, meditation and relaxation.
Over the past several months, Esquivel also handled Evidation Health’s $45 million Series D, Vida Health’s $25 million funding round, PlushCare’s $23 million Series B, Nurx’s $22.5 million funding and Alpha Health’s $20 million Series A,
Esquivel advises many other leading technology companies and venture capital firms, including Andreessen Horowitz, AppLovin, brightwheel, Boxed, Curology, Everlane, Figma, Future, GGV Capital, Honor, Latch, Lumosity, Rock Health, Saildrone, TigerConnect, Tile and TrialSpark.
Esquivel co-chairs Fenwick’s healthtech practice, leads the firm’s Life Sciences Legal Insights blog and also teaches venture capital law at Stanford Law School. He receives consistent recognition for the excellence of his work and has been honored among the United States’ leading lawyers for work with emerging companies by both Chambers USA and The Legal 500.