Story
The Prinz Law Office was founded in 2004, but the firm’s story really started in 2000, when firm founder Kristie Prinz left the city of Atlanta where she had started her legal career, and relocated West to work in the Palo Alto office of the NYC based IP law boutique of Pennie & Edmonds, LLP.
Kristie arrived in Silicon Valley in search of more interesting transactional law experience and more opportunity as a young female lawyer, with ideally more international business opportunities, since she had always had a passion for international business. Kristie found all of these on her arrival to the West Coast.
In its pre-dot com days, Silicon Valley was a vibrant, exciting business community full of innovative ideas and expats from all over the world. The clients Kristie represented at Pennie & Edmonds were working on new treatments to cure a variety of diseases as well as other new innovations, and outside the firm, almost anyone you met was trying to build the next great Silicon Valley company out of his garage. It was an exciting time to arrive in Silicon Valley.
As it turned out, though, Pennie had approached its final days and suddenly closed at the end of 2003 after more than 100 years of business and having expanded to four offices around the country. This event unexpectedly sent Kristie on the path of legal entrepreneurship in the place she had barely just arrived at and hardly knew.
Kristie founded The Prinz Law Office in early 2004 and began her journey as a young legal entrepreneur focusing on developing a firm brand through content marketing on the Internet. She found her voice as a legal blogger and learned to give legal presentations on legal issues related to her practice. Kristie had always had an interest in journalism as a student, serving as news editor of her college paper and also writing for her high school paper and even her own column as a high school student in the local paper, and those skills came in handy as she worked to develop a marketing presence to support her new Silicon Valley practice. Through her online thought leadership and other marketing activities, she landed technology and life sciences clients all over California and in many countries around the world, all who were looking to grow business opportunities in Silicon Valley.
But sudden self-employment in Silicon Valley made it difficult to find community and to develop a referral network, despite taking on various leadership roles in various professional groups, so eventually Kristie started seeking out a path to build more of a community and referral network, which led her to connect with ProVisors, a national networking organization that was expanding at the time she came across it. Joining ProVisors eventually opened new doors for Kristie and led to her build her own industry-focused communities in her fields of practice and eventually to agree to take on a group leadership role within the ProVisors community, building the Silicon Valley Virtual group for ProVisors, which was launched in late 2024.
The Prinz Law Office today is the culmination of firm founder Kristie Prinz’s own entrepreneurial journey. It continues to serve the technology and life science communities in Silicon Valley, throughout California, and worldwide, and also is now expanding to serve the new innovation communities growing in the Atlanta region.
Firm Founder Kristie Prinz and The Prinz Law Office continue to focus and build on the same values of innovation, community, connection, leadership, and participation in the global business world that have been meaningful to both as they have each written their respective Silicon Valley stories.
