Founders and Directors

David Ardia (Director and Co-Founder): David is a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. He received his J.D. degree, summa cum laude, from Syracuse University College of Law and an LL.M. from Harvard Law School. Prior to coming to the Berkman Center, he was assistant counsel at The Washington Post and before that was an associate at Williams & Connolly in Washington, DC, where he handled a range of intellectual property and media litigation. While at Williams & Connolly, David also performed pre-publication libel review for the National Enquirer and In Touch Weekly. David is a former member of the Newspaper Association of America’s Legal Affairs Committee and is a current member of the First Amendment and Media Litigation Committee of the American Bar Association, the Media Law Committee of the District of Columbia Bar, and the New England Media Lawyers Group.

Sam Bayard (Assistant Director): Sam is a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. He received his J.D. degree, summa cum laude, from Cornell Law School in 2001, where he was Managing Editor of the Cornell Law Review. In December 2006, he completed an LL.M. in International and Comparative Law at the American University in Cairo, where he also intensively studied the Arabic language and got to witness the veritable explosion of Egyptian blogging activity. Before moving to Cairo, Sam was a litigation associate at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz in New York. Sam also clerked for the Honorable Lewis Kaplan in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. As a clerk, Sam worked on numerous cases involving intellectual property and emerging technology issues and assisted Judge Kaplan in preparing his remarks for the 2001 Brace Lecture for the Copyright Society of the U.S.A. which addressed the Judge’s controversial opinion in Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Reimerdes.

Dan Gillmor (Co-Founder): Dan is the director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University and the founder and director of the Center for Citizen Media. Dan is the author of “We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People.” From 1994 until early 2005, Dan was a columnist at the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper, and wrote a blog for SiliconValley.com. He joined the Mercury News after six years with the Detroit Free Press. Before that, he was with the Kansas City Times and several newspapers in Vermont. During 2005 he co-founded Bayosphere, a San Francisco Bay Area website, which is now part of Backfence.com's collection of hyper-local community sites.

Kimberley Isbell (Staff Attorney): Kimberley is a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. She received her J.D. degree from Harvard Law School in 2000, where she was Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Law Record and President of the HLS Civil Liberties Union. Prior to joining the Berkman Center, she was an associate at law firms in Washington, DC and Richmond, Virginia. While in private practice, Kimberley specialized in many aspects of domestic and international intellectual property and technology counseling, prosecution and litigation, with an emphasis on intellectual property, technology, Internet and e-commerce licenses and agreements; domain name disputes; clearance, registration and management of trademark assets; advertising review; promotions law; and litigation and dispute resolution related to intellectual property and technology, with an emphasis on trademark and copyright matters. Kimberley is the former chair of the American Bar Association Intellectual Property Law Section's Committee 205 – Trade Identity and Unfair Competition.

Matt Lovell (Co-Founder): Matt is a partner in the Chicago office of Kirkland & Ellis LLP and is a former assistant director of the Clinical Program in Cyberlaw at the Berkman Center. A 2002 graduate of Harvard Law School, Matt specializes in intellectual property law (copyright, patent, trademark, trade secret, and rights of publicity), general corporate law, contract law, and intellectual property aspects of corporate transactions, bankruptcy and antitrust.

Phil Malone (Co-Founder): Phil is director of the Berkman Center’s Clinical Program in Cyberlaw. Phil came to the Berkman Center after 20 years as a federal prosecutor with the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, where he focused on high-technology industries, the Internet and computer software and hardware. Beginning in 1996 Phil was lead counsel in the DOJ's investigations of Microsoft, and he was the primary career counsel, along with outside counsel David Boies, in the trial of U.S. v. Microsoft Corp.