Frederic G. Hammond, known as Fritz, is an American lawyer whose career centered on corporate and securities work for technology companies in Boston, Massachusetts. He served as general counsel of Avid Technology and later as senior vice president and general counsel of Aspen Technology, Inc.
Education
Hammond studied at Yale College, the undergraduate college of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, which was founded in 1701. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree there in 1981.
He later attended Boston College Law School, where he received a Juris Doctor in 1986. The school was formally organized in 1929 as the law school of a Jesuit university and held its first classes in the Lawyer's Building on Beacon Street in downtown Boston. It received American Bar Association accreditation in 1932 and later moved to its permanent campus in Newton, Massachusetts. Hammond was admitted to the Massachusetts bar in 1986.
Career
Hammond was an attorney at Ropes & Gray, a Boston law firm founded in 1865 by two Harvard Law School graduates, John Codman Ropes and John Chipman Gray. The firm's early clients were mainly individuals and Harvard University, and it adopted the permanent name Ropes & Gray in 1961. Before 1992 he worked in the firm's corporate and business law, intellectual property law, and international law groups.
In 1992 Hammond became general counsel of Avid Technology, Inc., a position he held until 1999. Avid was founded in August 1987 in Tewksbury, Massachusetts, by Bill Warner, a former marketing manager at Apollo Computer, to let editors copy video footage to digital disks and make trial cuts. Its first nonlinear editing prototype, the Avid/1 Media Composer, was shown at the National Association of Broadcasters convention in 1988 and was built on Apple Macintosh II computers.
From 1999 to 2004 Hammond was vice president of business affairs and general counsel of Gomez Advisors, Inc., an Internet performance management and benchmarking technology services firm. His responsibilities included corporate finance, mergers and acquisitions, corporate and creditor restructurings, and commercial contracts management.
In February 2005 Hammond became a partner in the Boston office of Hinckley, Allen & Snyder LLP, where he handled SEC disclosure and other public company matters until June 2005.
Later in 2005 he joined Aspen Technology, Inc., a Cambridge, Massachusetts company that provides software solutions and services to the process industries. As senior vice president and general counsel, he held global responsibility for corporate governance and legal transactions, and he also served as the company's secretary.
Hammond was also a partner of S. E. Giorno.
