BYRON XAVIER

Byron is the Founder and Managing Director of Xavier & Associates LLC. He has assisted clients on various matters throughout the region and coordinated multi-jurisdictional actions and programs.

Having spent time both as a practising trial lawyer and as regional General Counsel for a multi-national corporation, Byron has developed an in-depth understanding of how to blend legal solutions with commercial realities in order to help clients meet their business objectives.

After reading law at the National University of Singapore, Byron started out in private practice in 1999, where he managed contentious and non-contentious matters for international clients in the intellectual property and technology spheres in addition to handling general transactional matters. He also handled criminal prosecutions for copyright and trademark owners against pirates and counterfeiters, worked with trade associations for the global business and entertainment software industries, represented right collecting societies and participated in dialogues with government authorities on legislative amendments to intellectual property laws. Throughout his time in practice, Byron gained immense experience and insight on helping clients commercialise their IP assets.

In 2004, he left practice to join Epson Singapore Pte Ltd, the Southeast and South Asian headquarters for the Seiko Epson Corporation, as General Counsel. He established and led a legal team that expanded Epson’s legal coverage and infrastructure. This period saw him broaden his experience base to cover corporate and commercial legal work, lead and implement various compliance programs and manage and resolve contentious matters in numerous areas. Leveraging on his intellectual property expertise, he also put in place a multi-pronged program that enabled Epson to recover significant market share from illegitimate infringers throughout the region. As counsel to Epson’s senior management, he was frequently called upon to use his litigation background to provide advice on risk management and navigate complicated and ambiguous business environments to resolve intricate issues; as a team leader, he developed and managed a team that consistently delivered workable, efficient outcomes for business units, often within resource limitations.

Within the team, Byron is known as the strategist, the big-picture guy, the pragmatic optimist. A collaborator and a team player, he believes that knowing each client’s unique context allows him work best, drawing from a common culture, set of values and goals.

Byron has also trained numerous lawyers who have gone on to sterling careers in the legal field, whether in practice or as in-house counsel, believing that knowledge and experience are best preserved when they are passed on and used.

Byron has a broad range of interests, ranging from tennis and football to cinema and literature. A self-described repository of useless and unusual information, he started out as an avid coin collector and has since moved on to various other things, believing that they’ll either have some value someday or be of use to somebody.