Modern Counsel #41

Bidding

Bidding

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Bob Tronnes unpacks building a strong litigation team at eBay P52

We combine ingenuity with experience to achieve great outcomes for our clients in high-stakes litigation and complex business transactions. With offices strategically located in major financial hubs across the United States and in the United Kingdom, we deliver partnerdriven service in areas of focus where we are recognized leaders, including global litigation, crisis management, life sciences, technology, and brand and reputation management.

eBay’s Bob Tronnes, associate general counsel and head of global litigation, leads his team with the driving belief that all people are inherently good P52

Implement

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Carolyn Drayer-Greenwalt shares how her tenure at the SEC lead her to Patient Square Capital, a dedicated healthcare-focused private equity firm

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Anne Hilby is leading Zipline as the company is on a mission to increase health access and equity as its drones deliver to governments, corporations, and communities around the world for better public health

Feature

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Dipo Ashiru gives a behind-the-scenes look at the role of general counsel and shares how he prepared himself to lead all things legal at Veritas Capital

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Scholastica Baker has found her ideal match in McDonald’s Corporation, where she can stay true to who she is while taking her career to the next level

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IPSY went from startup to success faster than anyone had anticipated. Anna Brannan is part of the small-but-mighty legal team helping the large subscription box company reach its fans around the country and beyond.

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Kenyatta Beverly is creating new pathways for minority lawyers by encouraging them to embrace fear

Nadia Almaleh (Drayer-Greenwalt), Peter Garritano (Ashiru), Eugene McKinney (Beverly)

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Pivot

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As Jaime Heins contemplates his next professional chapter, the GC will leverage a career spent building out experience that will make him valuable, whatever the next act may be

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Erin Sedloff finds a multitude of ways to empower Mainsail, including each of its portfolio companies, by helping companies raise capital and build their businesses

Focus

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Starting his legal career amid the Great Recession, Robert Peters learned early on how to master the art of embracing change as an opportunity in a rapidly changing business environment

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Daphne Walker has enjoyed a successful career in nursing and in the legal profession. At JPS, she’s gotten a chance to unite both passions.

Evaluate

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Mark DeVitre shares his journey to Allen Media and the company’s successes, systemic challenges, and hopes for the future

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How do you get people to care about something that makes them cringe? That’s a question Emily O’Brien tackles as deputy chief tax counsel to much success.

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Creative

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Billy Yost

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Andrew Evangelista

Editor’s Letter

A common misconception about lawyers

is that they are constantly seeking an argument. While TV shows and movies often depict attorneys in courthouses presenting their cases to a full jury and a presiding judge, only about 5-10 percent of business litigation cases go to trial instead of settling. If anything, litigation attorneys do as much as possible to avoid arguments.

Picking one’s battles is a skill instilled in us from an early age and is emphasized over and over throughout our lives and careers. For attorneys, a settlement is more often than not the best-case scenario for a case, especially because a court trial extends the amount of time and money spent by both sides on the case and exacerbates both the situation and the risk.

But that fact doesn’t mean that the high stakes of a trial don’t captivate the American audience. The renditions of major trials, such as the Chicago Seven (which was turned into a Netflix movie, The Trial of the Chicago 7 ) and the O.J. Simpson trial (turned into The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story by FX), put a spotlight on the federal justice system and attempt to show what goes on behind such infamous cases. Now, as current trials have become readily available to the public, litigators know the world is watching.

On the other hand, take for example Suits, the most streamed show on Netflix in 2023, even overtaking The Office ’s record in 2020. The fictional show about corporate attorneys in New York City primarily depicts the settling side of cases. With the main characters doing whatever they can to either get the cases dismissed or to win in settling negotiations, it is in no way accurate, but it may be closer to the ratio of settling versus trial time.

But, back to real life. This litigation issue of Modern Counsel highlights attorneys who work to protect their companies and reduce risk. They know how to pick their battles, how to argue with grace, and when to settle. In a career that requires strong discernment, these featured leaders exercise exceptional judgment and serve as role models in the legal world.

Navpreet Dhillon Managing Editor

Implement

Celebrating legal leaders’ latest efforts and achievements, including transactions, expansions, negotiations, and inclusion initiatives

Co mplia nce Champions

James Butler builds world-class compliance programs wherever he goes

By Billy Yost

IN HIS FIRST IN-HOUSE ROLE AT WHAT

became Lumen Technologies, James Butler began at a company of 6,500 US-based employees. By the time he left (and having been promoted three times along the way), employees had ballooned to 45,000 with operations in sixty different countries.

Butler was one of ten attorneys in-house and had the opportunity to get involved in as many different aspects of that growth and development as his schedule could allow. The attorney with a background in litigation and employment law was suddenly supporting commercial contracting, marketing, and sales.

Since then, Butler has grown his compliance and ethics bona fides to become a leader in the space for public companies. The current VP and deputy general counsel of compliance and business integrity at Ansys has brought his legal and compliance leadership to a company you’ve probably interacted with—whether you know it or not. Ansys software can be found in airplanes, autonomous vehicles, mobile devices, and computers. The company has been an eager contributor to the future of technology.

Since coming to Ansys in 2020, Butler oversees a geographically dispersed team of twenty attorneys and legal professionals. Butler says his job is to empower his team, supporting operations across the US, Asia Pacific, Europe, Middle East, and Africa to harness their subject and geographic expertise and help ensure Ansys’s compliance across the globe.

Compliance Champions

One of Butler’s biggest wins at Ansys during his brief tenure is the continuing influence and build-out of Ansys’s Ethics and Com-

pliance Champions program. The Champions program selects between twenty-five and thirty employees across the globe who aren’t part of the core ethics and compliance team and charges them with learning about the ethics and compliance program to act as ambassadors for the greater organization of some six thousand people all over the world.

“These program participants come from different functional areas and backgrounds and help us spread our message out to the rest of the organization,” Butler explains. “It helps bring information back to us as well, to understand what’s happening in particular regions or geographies, and lock in if there are areas we need to spend some extra time focusing on.”

Individuals will serve two years, meeting with the ethics and compliance team quarterly to learn, share, and grow. Butler says the program places a heavy emphasis on data analytics to get a holistic picture of what’s happening enterprise-wide—to identify trends and to determine what’s working and what needs improvement.

A Very Special Team

Butler says the core team tasked with ensuring global compliance at Ansys is a most impressive one.

“This is a special team that can deliver pragmatic, solutions-oriented guidance and then is able to implement that guidance in support of the business,” Butler says. “This is a group that rolls up its sleeves, not just to give the organization a road map of where the business needs to go, but to actually help them get there.”

In developing his own team, Butler says he emphasizes the soft skills that may not be the first thought for legal professionals. The VP says that the best legal guidance in

Ethics Don’t Bend, but Strings Do Even leaders get the blues. That’s where the guitars help. Along with the family, career, and successful teams James Butler has created over the years, his guitar collection is also first-rate. The VP is still the proud owner of his first guitar, a 1976 Fender Stratocaster, and of the 1924 Martin 0-42 acoustic, the 1951 Fender Telecaster, and a small armory of other guitars at his disposal.

“My first real job was teaching beginning guitar students in Birmingham, Alabama, where I grew up,” Butler says. “I’ve been a lifelong learner, and it’s the same with the guitar.”

the world means little if that guidance can’t be communicated to internal clients in a concise, digestible manner. How guidance is delivered is just as critical as the guidance itself. That’s why Butler’s team thrives and why their internal clients feel so supported.

The Team at Home

Before discussing his career or his team at work, the first people Butler mentions are the ones at home. The success the VP is most proud of lies in the family he and his wife have built.

“The person I most look up to is my wife,” Butler says. “She’s shown me the importance of having faith and perseverance. She’s an incredibly hard worker who gives so much of her time and energy to others. She is a strong Christian who has helped me prioritize my own faith and love for my family.”

Butler says his three children, who range from twenty to thirteen, have provided the lawyer with daily exercises in understanding, appreciating, and communicating with people who all have their own strong points of view. This doesn’t sound like a euphemism for “arguing with the kids” when Butler says it. They’ve taught him what he considers an invaluable lesson in leadership, which is the importance of recognizing differing perspectives and working to understand and appreciate others’ perspectives even when they are different from his own.

Jones Day: “James is a tremendous lawyer who has succeeded in enhancing Ansys’s culture of compliance. It has been an honor for our firm to work with Ansys and James. He is a true professional in every way.”

—Jimmy Kitchen, Partner

Jones Day is pleased to join Modern Counsel in recognizing James Butler, ANSYS’s Vice President & Deputy General Counsel for Compliance and Business Integrity. We applaud James’s outstanding leadership and are proud to work with such talented clients.

Why Jones Day? The mutual commitment of, and seamless collaboration by, a true partnership on a client’s behalf.

Steven Scrogham Gets to the Core

Inside Steven Scrogham’s quest to build an effective legal team and a culture of compliance at ProFrac Services by digging deep to truly understand the unique world of hydraulic fracturing

STEVEN SCROGHAM DREAMED OF being a doctor. That is, until he saw his Peruvian friend suffer a severe injury when a porcelain sink cracked and fell on his foot. Suddenly, he realized he might not be made for the emergency room. It was time to find a new calling.

The fateful event happened three months into Scrogham’s two-year stint in St. Petersburg, Russia, as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of

By Zach Baliva

Latter-day Saints. It was a turbulent era with Russia on the brink of economic crisis. As Scrogham traveled the streets of St. Petersburg and saw the impact of globalization in a post-socialist society, he realized how much he enjoyed looking at complex issues from all sides.

By the time his plane touched down back in the United States, Scrogham had a new plan. “I was interested in international business and knew a law

degree could put me in a position to help companies grow both domestically and internationally,” he explains. Scrogham immediately changed his major from pre-med to international politics and set out on a new path at Brigham Young University.

After graduating from BYU, Scrogham moved east to attend the University of Minnesota Law School before starting his law career representing

Steven Scrogham Chief Legal Officer, Chief Compliance Officer, and Corporate Secretary

public corporations as a securities associate in Milwaukee. After almost three years, he switched firms and was settling into life as a transactional and securities lawyer when he noticed something. “We were doing a lot of divestitures and not many acquisitions,” he says. It was 2007, and the financial crisis was about to hit.

As law firms contracted, Scrogham watched his friends and peers experience layoffs and struggle to bill hours. He took the opportunity to make another change, choosing to go in-house by taking a job with Abbott Laboratories in Chicago.

Scrogham’s transition from law firm to in-house practice was smooth. Abbott’s long history and established legal department afforded him the opportunity to learn from seasoned legal leaders, ask questions, and deepen his growing skill set. After three years, he found himself working exhaustively on Abbott’s 2012 spin-off of its branded pharmaceuticals business now known as AbbVie.

After the spin-off, Scrogham went with the new company and suddenly found himself thrust into a challenging and stretching role. “I had the rare opportunity to help build up a new public company,” he says. Not long after the spin-off, Scrogham worked on numerous major transactions and interacted directly with AbbVie’s senior leadership team. As he advised senior leaders in connection with major global mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and other financing transactions, Scrogham wanted to be seen as a key contributor. To find success, he would have to step up.

And step up, he did. A series of major deals made between 2013 and 2023 transformed AbbVie into the sixth-largest biomedical company in the world. The

“Our teams working out in the field have very dangerous and highstress jobs, and that’s how we make our money. We have to understand everything our employees do in the field if we want to add value as a top-tier legal department in our industry.”

Fortune 100 company, with fifty thousand employees, reached $54 billion in annual revenue last year.

In 2020, AbbVie finalized the $63 billion acquisition of Allergan. As Scrogham worked on the integration team, he enjoyed learning more about AbbVie’s commercial, operations, regulatory, and research and development functions. “I wanted to move on from being a subject-matter expert and get more exposure to the business,” he says. That desire compelled him to look for something new. In the summer of 2023, Scrogham stepped into a new position as assistant general counsel and corporate secretary at ProFrac Services, a hydraulic fracturing service provider.

The acquisitive company with a proven record in energy and fracking had just gone public; Scrogham knew he would have the chance to learn a new industry and help build a strong compliance culture while establishing a robust internal legal team.

Scrogham tapped into his vast experience at publicly traded companies and started to put the foundations of a best-in-class team in place. After just six weeks, the company’s general counsel left. Scrogham saw another chance to step up. “I redoubled my efforts to build strong relationships and offered to do things that were outside of both my comfort zone and job description,” he says. “I focused on hitting a home run on my traditional work while showing I could also be an asset on special projects.”

The plan worked. Six months after he joined ProFrac, Scrogham was promoted to chief legal officer, chief compliance officer, and corporate secretary in early 2024.

Not long after the move, Scrogham gave his team of six an unusual

assignment—they went through the field training meant for employees that work on fracking sites. “Our teams working out in the field have very dangerous and high-stress jobs, and that’s how we make our money,” he explains. “We have to understand everything our employees do in the field if we want to add value as a top-tier legal department in our industry.”

Scrogham’s playbook is complex in practice but simple in theory. He intends to make his legal team a strong partner to the business by establishing a foundational culture of governance and compliance to finalize contracts with ProFrac customers that generate desirable outcomes for all parties. He also wants his team to complete M&A and finance deals to help the company execute its strategic priorities.

“Steve leads an impressive legal team at ProFrac. He’s laser-focused on empowering business results and fosters that approach across his team,” says James Bedar, partner at Brown Rudnick. “When we’re working with ProFrac on mergers and acquisitions, financings, or compliance matters, the work is complex and can be incredibly nuanced. In addition to his intellect, experience and drive, Steve’s success is due to his ability to cut through the details and tackle legal issues by asking, ‘How can we solve puzzle X to achieve business result Y?’ The entire legal team shares Steve’s business goal-oriented mindset because he leads by example.”

On the business side, ProFrac is focused on outperforming its 2023 results. This year, its operations and commercial teams are busy getting fleets up and running, improving usage rates, generating a top-tier customer experience, and cutting costs. Scrogham’s team, which he calls the best in the frack business, is once again ready to step up and help make an impact.

Gibson Dunn is proud to recognize our friend and client

Steve Scrogham of ProFrac

Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP is a leading international law firm.

Chambers USA (2023)

Gibson Dunn was ranked as one of the top firms in the U.S. for National Energy: Oil and Gas. Many of our Energy Group partners are ranked as being among the best energy transactional and regulatory lawyers in the nation.

Law360 (2023)

Gibson Dunn was named by Law360 as an Energy Group of the Year.

“As outside counsel, we have worked with Steven on many complex projects. He has shepherded numerous endeavors from inception to completion, working closely with us, and we have truly always enjoyed working with him.”

—Hillary Holmes, Partner

For more information on Gibson Dunn, please visit www.gibsondunn.com.

Gibson Dunn:

A Challenge to Build a Global Compliance Program

Carolyn Drayer-Greenwalt shares how her tenure at the SEC lead her to Patient Square Capital, a dedicated healthcarefocused private equity firm

By Noah Johnson

FROM THE OUTSIDE LOOKING IN, AN agency like the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) might seem mysterious, sterile, and cold in some ways. But if you ask Carolyn Drayer-Greenwalt, who spent approximately three years as an attorney adviser at the federal agency, those perceptions couldn’t be further from the truth.

“Working at the SEC was one of the best jobs I’ve had in my career. It really transformed my perspective on the power of working alongside talented colleagues,” she reflects. “The organization was filled with smart people from various backgrounds,

Carolyn Drayer-Greenwalt

Chief Compliance Officer

Patient Square Capital

and everyone shared knowledge to empower each other.”

Her experience at the SEC inspired her to seek another mission-driven opportunity. In 2022, she got her chance at Patient Square Capital, a leading firm that invests across various segments of healthcare, including development-stage therapeutics, commercial-stage pharmaceuticals, healthcare providers, tech-enabled services, and medical devices.

As the firm’s chief compliance officer, Drayer-Greenwalt aims to build a world-class program that leverages the power of relationships as her foundation to respond to evolving business needs amid a shifting regulatory landscape.

“Building a strong compliance program requires trust with the people you work with and support internally,” Drayer-Greenwalt shares. “Being in my position, it’s not only important to have internal alignment on compliance process and procedures, but also crucial that I am integrated into the business. To be successful, my colleagues need to consider the compliance team a key resource for questions they’re already facing, as well as a forward-thinking thought partner for future opportunities they’re considering. Prioritizing communication across the organization helps catalyze the type of change that we need in our industry.”

She continues: “Regulatory rules are dynamic, which requires diligence and readiness to adapt to changes quickly. Our business and operations, risk areas, and enforcement priorities will continue to evolve. Education and engagement need to be an ongoing effort. We’ve created a collaborative culture where people feel comfortable regularly coming to the compliance

Nadia Almaleh

“The chance to be a part of the growth of Patient Square has been incredibly fulfilling, motivating me to push my boundaries and reach new heights.”

team, which positions our team to respond appropriately and focus on effective execution.”

Drayer-Greenwalt looks forward to building on this success by adding more members to the compliance team and continuing to lead with a philosophy that harkens back to her SEC days: “Share information, empower people, take time to teach, and don’t be afraid to learn or to ask questions,” she says.

Drayer-Greenwalt never planned on pursuing a career in compliance. She started her career in legal telecommunications before transitioning to a contract administrator role at a hedge fund in New York, which laid the foundation for her financial expertise. From there, she rose through the ranks to become in-house counsel, helping the organization wade through the financial crisis in 2008 and the Dodd-Frank Act. As a result of the latter legislation, Drayer-Greenwalt was given a mandate to create a compliance program for the company.

She went on to develop her compliance expertise in various roles, including associate general counsel for the Texas Comptroller of

Public Accounts, attorney adviser at the SEC, and chief compliance officer at Genstar Capital. When Drayer-Greenwalt was ready for her next challenge, a former SEC colleague introduced her to Adam Fliss, a founding partner and general counsel at Patient Square.

“I thought that joining a firsttime fund would be rewarding since it provided me a blank sheet of paper to build a compliance program from the ground up,” she says. Two years later, joining Patient Square exceeded her expectations. “The chance to be a part of the growth of Patient Square has been incredibly fulfilling, motivating me to push my boundaries and reach new heights.”

She continues, “Being a part of a team who is supportive, empowering, and gives me the autonomy to be myself has been a game changer in my career.”

Kirkland & Ellis LLP:

“Carolyn is deeply skilled and dedicated to her work. Her wisdom and expertise have made her an invaluable asset to the Patient Square legal and compliance team, and we anticipate many more victories for them.”

—Alpa Patel, PC, Partner

Changing the Face of Customer Service

Afiniti is leveraging powerful AI tools to optimize call center performance across several industries, but chief legal officer Sam Logan says the human element is still critical to success

By Zach Baliva

WHAT SHOULD BE A SIMPLE CALL TO a phone company or cable provider can turn into a difficult ordeal for any consumer—endless holds, transfers from agent to agent, and bots that can’t seem to hear correctly. By the time the consumer connects with an actual human agent, it’s important that the agent is well-suited to handle the concern. Afiniti uses artificial intelligence to optimize these conversations and improve the way its clients engage their customers.

Sam Logan is Afiniti’s chief legal officer, general counsel, and corporate secretary. He manages the legal, security, and compliance teams charged with managing risk, enabling innovation, and protecting the company’s patents and trade secrets.

While Afiniti leverages the power of predictive AI, Logan is quick to point out that its solutions don’t replace humans—it makes humans more effective. “We are a human-first company because our AI enables humans to interact more positively in a business environment,” he explains.

Since its inception in 2006, Afiniti has demonstrated an ability to make AI work at scale and drive revenue for clients. Leading banks, insurance providers, and telecommunications companies often have tens of thousands of call center agents to handle their enormous call volumes. Each of these calls is an opportunity to impact the customer

“We are a human-first company because our AI enables humans to interact more positively in a business environment.”

relationship, either positively or negatively. So, companies want to make sure that their customer talks with the best available agent.

Afiniti’s patented solution analyzes data such as customer preferences and agent history before pairing callers and agents to predict how well they are likely to interact. Correct assumptions lead to outcomes like increased renewal rates, fewer cancellations, happier customers, and increased employee satisfaction. Afiniti measures its results against a normalized benchmark, and charges only for the gain delivered.

Logan came to Afiniti in 2018 for the chance to be part of the burgeoning global AI industry. He grew up in the Midwest, but he traveled internationally from a young age as Logan’s parents believed it was important to expose their kids to other cultures. Seeing parts of Africa, Europe, South America, and Asia gave Logan a desire to find a career where he could make a global impact. He studied abroad in England during college, spent a gap year working on international rule of law issues, and then enrolled at Georgetown University Law Center.

“As artificial intelligence becomes more mainstream, we must continue to demonstrate that we are deploying these tools in a safe and ethical way.”

When he graduated in 2005, Logan took a job as a corporate associate in the DC office of Latham & Watkins. There, veteran lawyers afforded him the opportunity to gain experience in mergers and acquisitions, corporate governance, cross-border transactions, securities, and other matters.

Working alongside talented attorneys who also taught him intangible soft skills prepared Logan to make the leap in-house, which he did by taking a role with education-tech company Blackboard in 2010. This important era helped Logan accomplish two goals. Supporting the company as it expanded into new countries and negotiating complex commercial and corporate agreements—including representing Blackboard in its acquisition of a number of other companies outside the US—bolstered his international business experience while preparing him for a future as a chief legal officer.

Logan leans on his varied experience at Afiniti as he navigates data privacy and security, AI regulation, and the other legal issues facing any major AI-driven technology company. That means working in close partnership with stakeholders across the company, including Afiniti’s chief data officer and information security lead. Together, they seek to ensure all products and services meet six internal “responsible AI” standards, which include accountability, explainability, transparency, fairness, data protection, and compliance. “As artificial intelligence becomes more mainstream, we must continue to demonstrate that we are deploying these tools in a safe and ethical way,” Logan says.

Sam Logan Chief Legal Officer, General Counsel, and Corporate Secretary Afiniti

Naturally, innovation is of critical importance at Afiniti, and the company puts a heavy emphasis on research and development. A patent incentive program motivates inventors to submit new ideas, celebrates their achievements, and helps their fellow employees understand the importance of intellectual property.

In that spirit, Afiniti continues to innovate products that complement its flagship AI offering. The company has rolled out a self-service AI product that gives users the ability to add their internal data sources, select the metrics that matter most to them, and visualize AI

modeling on a central dashboard. And to underpin the AI offerings, Afiniti has introduced a highly scalable customer engagement platform that can handle any type of interaction, while dramatically reducing the amount of hardware required to operate a call center, which helps clients save money and move toward carbon net-neutrality.

As AI goes mainstream, Logan and his colleagues are thinking about all they can do to help clients build the call center of the future. Although he expects bots or generative AI tools to field basic questions and handle low-

value requests like password resets, Logan doesn’t envision companies moving to fully automated call centers anytime soon. “People want to talk to people when they are making big decisions,” he says. “There is a human element to business that no technology can replace.”

King & Spalding:

“Sam is a consummate general counsel—a thoughtful and strategic big-picture thinker who is also deeply knowledgeable about the intricacies of his business. It is always an absolute pleasure to work with Sam.”

—David Lesser, Partner

The Best of Both Worlds

Truan Savage, a musician and lawyer, is the perfect choice for TIDAL’s general counsel

By Billy Yost

TRUAN SAVAGE HAS BEEN PASSIONATE about music for as long as he can remember, both as a listener and performer. Despite earning his JD and pursuing a life in law, that passion hasn’t diminished. As recently as last year, the general counsel at music streaming service TIDAL released new music under the pseudonym Torchsong.

But as soothing as his works may be for the soul, that’s only half of his story— one that includes acting as counsel at Lyft and HBO and a successful run as an “outside in-house counsel” for advertising and marketing agencies, companies not often equipped with their own in-house law departments.

You may know TIDAL from the high-profile 2015 press conference boasting Jay-Z, Beyoncé, Madonna, and other music luminaries who were co-owners of the artist-first business. Or perhaps it was TIDAL’s 2021 acquisition by Jack Dorsey-owned Block Inc., which includes

Square, Cash App, Spiral, and TBD. That move might seem odd, but to Savage, it makes perfect sense.

“Block’s mission in everything that they do is centered around economic empowerment,” Savage explains. “Every one of their businesses focuses on expanding access to the economy. People may have been confused when Block acquired TIDAL, but when you consider the everyday struggles of even significant musicians, we aim to empower all musicians and help them make careers from their art. Our listeners are a priority, and we will continue to lean into finding ways to help artists fund their work and their lives.”

That mission is what drew Savage to TIDAL in 2021, and his commitment to that mission is no doubt related to his promotion to GC in summer 2023. In his role, Savage’s team has helped get the refreshed TIDAL Rising initiative for artists up and running. Initially posi-

tioned as more of an artist highlight and playlist exposure tool, TIDAL Rising worked to tie in its mission of economic empowerment for artists.

TIDAL Rising artists receive direct economic support that can be used to record new music, market that music, or pay for any of the other litany of expenses that accompany an artist’s life.

“We’re going to continue to build out this program and see how we can continue to support artists more directly,” Savage says.

For artists who utilize the company’s artists platform, TIDAL Artist Home, to customize their profiles and promote their music, Savage says a whole new array of capabilities are in the works. Already successful examples include the “TIDAL Collabs” feature that connects like-minded artists who might pair well

together, encouraging them to collaborate and cross-pollinate genres and fan bases.

There’s no other streaming service with this offering at present, and Savage says TIDAL aims to continue rolling out new features that will make the TIDAL experience unlike any other.

And the others, the Apple Musics or Spotifys of the world? Savage and TIDAL at large have a much different perspective than those who might consider TIDAL an underdog in the streaming wars.

“We’re carving out a unique customer base with a specific mission in mind,” Savage says. “I think all you need to do is read a little more about us to understand there’s something special here, and we want to be known for what we believe.”

Truan Savage General Counsel

TIDAL

“There’s so much collaboration and decision-making that goes into making a fully fleshed recorded song, but it’s not stressful to me. It’s how I relax.”

Truan Savage of TIDAL

While at Lyft, Savage got in-house experience at an innovative tech company. At HBO, he got experience in more traditional media. Working at TIDAL, both as a lawyer and a musician, is a perfect match for him. The GC can help innovate on the product development side as well as lean into the more traditional everyday work of the job.

And the rest of his day? Savage can likely be found at his piano, both composing and producing music.

“There’s always a point every few months when I realize I’ve compiled enough material and that it’s time to record and produce it,” the attorney explains. “There’s so much collaboration and decision-making that goes into making a fully fleshed recorded song, but it’s not stressful to me. It’s how I relax.”

Savage recently joined some old friends for a catch-up hang, and one of them, a gigging musician, shared that he had arranged a song Savage wrote back in college.

“There was something incredibly validating about that,” the TIDAL GC says. “I made that choice to pursue law in college, but my music is still seeping out into the world a little bit in a lot of different ways. I get to support artists like my friend from my day job, and I feel like I’ve gotten the best of both passions.”

Reaching New Heights

Anne Hilby leads Zipline as the company is on a mission to increase health access and equity as its drones deliver to governments, corporations, and communities around the world

By Zach Baliva

THE REPUBLIC OF GHANA IS LEADING life-saving initiatives. The population wrestles with a lack of access to important medical resources such as vaccines. Residents often don’t receive the appropriate and necessary medical care, resulting in what the medical community calls a “missed opportunity.” A missed opportunity can amount to a significant public health crisis, and that’s why the Ghanaian government is working with Zipline, a company launched in 2014 that operates the world’s largest automated delivery system.

Zipline’s delivery drones have flown more than 65 million commercial autonomous miles and have made over 950,000 deliveries. In 2019, Zipline was delivering about 800 vaccine doses per month in Ghana. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and that number suddenly spiked to 9,000. In November 2022, Zipline flew over 400,000 total vaccines in Ghana, cutting delivery time from days to hours and reaching some of the country’s most vulnerable communities.

Anne Titus Hilby is Zipline’s deputy general counsel. The product, IP, and regulatory specialist joined the company in 2019 to build compliance, risk management, and regulatory counseling functions as Zipline expanded in Africa and prepared for its domestic launch. She also generated global employee training and policies while working as lead employment counsel.

Technology powers Zipline, and the legal team’s behind-the-scenes work is crucial to its success. Hilby created an important product counseling function that manages global patent strategy and IP litigation, along with the company’s regulatory strategy in areas like healthcare, telecommunications, zoning, and sustainability. She’s also building a data privacy

Facts and Figures

Customers and partners include Walmart, GNC, sweetgreen, Cleveland Clinic, Toyota Tsusho, Michigan Medicine, and the governments of Ghana and Rwanda

Anne Hilby Deputy General Counsel of Product, Privacy, & Intellectual Property Zipline

and security program. “I have to be an expert in the products, services, and features we’re deploying,” she says. “I embed myself with all internal teams early and collaborate often.”

Zipline was already planning to launch delivery service in the US but accelerated that timeline when COVID hit. Before the end of May 2020, Zipline started delivering personal protective equipment (PPE). The company now makes and tests its drones, “Zips,” in California and reaches customers in numerous states, including Arkansas, where it has a partnership with Walmart for home delivery. By the end of 2025, Zipline will complete more annual flights than most airlines.

Hilby and her team are now busy assisting Zipline as the company prepares to launch its second-generation platform (P2). The new droid-indrone Zips will have increased speed, payloads, and precision. The P2 Zip is designed to hover above three

To date, Zipline has made 950,000 commercial deliveries

The company serves more than 4,000 hospitals and health centers

Zipline’s drone fleet reduces carbon emissions by 97%

P2 drones can make 10-mile deliveries in 10 minutes

A Zip departs on delivery every 70 seconds

Zipline has delivered 14 million vaccine doses and now operates across 8 countries on 4 continents

hundred feet and release a droid that descends to quietly and safely deliver a package within a two-foot radius. Zipline’s leaders say P2 will eventually handle the majority of domestic food and healthcare deliveries.

It’s a big claim, but Hilby remains unfazed—she’s frequently been part of high-pressure, big-stakes projects. During her time as an undergraduate student at Harvard, she took a semester off to work as a field organizer on a political campaign. She later played a prominent role in running the congressional campaign that helped Gabrielle Giffords narrowly defeat Jesse Kelly. In 2012, Hilby had a stint as legal extern to then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris. After earning her JD from Berkeley Law, she worked in the nation’s capital as an investigations and white-collar lawyer in private practice.

Although Hilby’s life and career have taken many twists and turns, she has identified one common thread. “In business and in politics, you can only win together, and it takes an outstanding team that believes the only option is success,” she says.

What makes an effective product counsel at a growing tech company? Hilby says the secret to success lies in the ability to “remain joyful in learning new things.” Ultra-precise drone delivery relies on complex science and engineering, and Hilby can’t manage risk and protect the company unless she understands its most intricate components. She’s

spent the last couple years learning about autonomous aerial logistics, vehicle behavior technology, aircraft acoustics, medical packaging testing, and more. This year, she plans to give herself a crash course she’s calling Computer Science 101.

When new lawyers ask Hilby for advice, she tells them to find the best training possible. “Law firms and others hiring new lawyers will train you during this unique moment in your career, and if you invest in your training, they will invest in you,” she says. “The more you put in, the more you get back.”

She also stresses the importance of finding outside interests. While Hilby was deeply involved in theater and dance at Harvard, she set performing aside to focus on the first era of her career. Now, she has the time to invest in the arts again. Since 2023, Hilby has served on the Los Angeles Ballet’s board of directors. Her goal? To help establish the company as a world-class troupe on par with Boston, San Francisco, New York, and the Joffrey. It’s another way Hilby is using her skills and passions to help a community or organization achieve its big goals.

Hooper, Lundy & Bookman:

“Anne’s a strategic-thinker with excellent judgment. She expertly and efficiently navigates complex regulatory matters to meet Zipline’s cutting-edge business objectives. It’s a true pleasure working with her.”

—David J. Vernon,

Partner

HEALTH LAW FROM EVERY ANGLE

HLB is the largest law firm in the U.S. dedicated exclusively to representing health care providers and suppliers.

The Power of Influence

Desiree Ralls-Morrison is proud to leverage her role at McDonald’s to influence issues like diversity and inclusiveness worldwide

By Noah Johnson

Desiree Ralls-Morrison

EVP, Chief Legal Officer, and Corporate Secretary

McDonald’s Corporation

Tarji Stewart

DESIREE RALLS-MORRISON HAD LED in-house legal teams in the healthcare industry for over twenty years before she was presented an opportunity to serve as chief legal officer at McDonald’s.

At first, she raised an eyebrow at the prospect of working for the iconic brand.

“I was probably a little bit of a snob coming in,” she chuckles. “I was like, ‘I’ve been in healthcare for decades saving lives. How hard can burgers and fries be?’”

She quickly learned that the brand was much more than burgers and fries and nostalgia. Its legal team is responsible for a brand with more than forty thousand restaurants in 110 markets around the world. The challenge of mitigating risks and delivering business priorities internationally for such an iconic brand was attractive to Ralls-Morrison. But so was the brand’s mission, which became apparent to the leader during initial conversations with CEO Chris Kempczinski.

“When we met, we talked about the company’s values, and I found that they were consistent with my own. I felt like it would be a company that I could connect with and that I’d have a shared sense of purpose with,” Ralls-Morrison says. “Also, [Kempczinski] was a newer CEO at the time, and he made the decision to surround himself with experienced C-suite executives. That told me that he wanted a partner, that he was a listener, and that he didn’t have a huge ego. That was the kind of leader I wanted to work with.”

Ralls-Morrison has learned from Kempczinski’s leadership. “Desiree is such an effective leader because she articulates a clear vision—grounded in her strong

values—for success and inspires her team to work collaboratively to accomplish corporate objectives,” says Ronald C. Machen, who serves as chair, litigation/controversy department at WilmerHale. “She leads her team in a strategic manner that sets a standard of excellence for other general counsel to follow.”

Today, Ralls-Morrison serves as executive vice president, chief legal officer, and corporate secretary. She oversees global legal and advises the board of directors on ways to manage risk and advance the brand’s values. For Ralls-Morrison, the role is a chance to impact communities around the world on issues that matter.

“The beauty of being at a company like McDonald’s is when you put certain stakes in the ground, other companies want to

know what you’re doing and how you’re viewing issues. It becomes bigger than just our company,” she shares. “That’s why it’s special to be a C-suite executive at the table and influence what happens in those spaces, whether it’s setting aspirational climate or diversity goals [or] working on how our people can feel more included in the workplace.”

Dennis Hopkins, partner at Perkins Coie, further recognizes how Ralls-Morrison’s leadership style impacts the legal team both in and out of house. “Desiree has a high-profile leadership role as chief legal officer of an iconic global company such as McDonald’s. She and her team manage a tremendous number of challenges daily,” he says. “Desiree’s counsel and decisions impact millions of customers and tens of

Expertise Spotlight

Ranked as a national US Trial Firm of the Year for the third consecutive year and as US Boutique Firm of the Year (Benchmark Litigation and Law360), Hueston Hennigan LLP is known for finding a way to win in the highest-stakes trials and in white-collar defense cases. Our “multi-year streak of trial wins” and innovative, winning motions practice places us amongst the best trial firms in the country and one of the “Most Feared Law Firms in Litigation” according to BTI Consulting Our successes achieved were made possible, says US News & World Report, because we are “the ultimate bet-the-company law firm.”

Hueston Hennigan’s remarkable success over the past few years have included a $50 billion “landmark” defense verdict for America’s drug industry (the firm’s first major victory in the nationwide opioid crisis litigation), a $293 million record-breaking Lanham Act award (a court recently awarded an additional $43 million, finding the case was exceptional), and the “largest-ever US trademark awards.” Recently, Hueston Hennigan secured a settlement exceeding $300 million for Match Group against Google in a historic antitrust case, and later participated in the trial against Google on behalf of Epic Games, which culminated in a landmark win.

Tarji Stewart

“People often ask what they can do during their rise up the corporate ladder, but we all have some value to add, even before you’ve reached that top position. The truth is you can do something. You just have to realize the power you have.”

thousands of restaurants and their operators and crew members around the globe and are critical to McDonald’s growth trajectory. She rightly sets a high bar for outside legal counsel, and we work proactively to help Desiree and her team see around the corners to mitigate legal risks.”

As the leader of a team of more than four hundred legal and compliance professionals, Ralls-Morrison says fostering a cohesive global culture in the legal department is a unique challenge. To do that, she sets the tone with a transparent, collaborative, and people-centered leadership style.

“I like to be very open about the things happening in the brand, in our function, and in the feedback I provide to my team. I pride myself on integrity, working really hard and putting out the very best work product, and I demand the same of them,” she emphasizes. “At the same time, I lead with empathy and compassion for them. I’m not so high up

in the organization that I’ve forgotten what it feels like to be them.”

“Desiree is among the best and most respected general counsels in the world, and her tenure at McDonald’s has been marked by achievement,” says Scott A. Barshay, corporate department chair at Paul, Weiss.

Her decades working for Fortune 500 companies in healthcare has also shown her the value of empowering legal teams to think of themselves as business units. That’s a mentality that she’s brought to her role at McDonald’s and that unites her team members across the globe.

Former US Attorney General Loretta Lynch, a Paul, Weiss litigation partner, sees Ralls-Morrison’s ability to unite a large team as a massive asset for McDonald’s. “Desiree is an inspiring and inclusive leader whose actions and decisions come from a place of profound personal and professional integrity, as well as a deep understanding of

her company’s mission and business priorities,” she says.

“I think it’s important for us all to have clear goals and objectives—KPI’s or metrics that we hold ourselves to,” Ralls-Morrison says. “And, that we really try to build the muscle of not just being an enabling function, but a business unit that has key deliverables and is continuing to drive speed, efficiency, innovation, and improvement.”

Before coming to McDonald’s, Ralls-Morrison had built a deep background in business strategy, crisis management, governance, and regulatory compliance.

During her time at Merck, she led global litigation efforts on cases that sought to determine whether vaccines could cause autism in children, which proved to be untrue. As general counsel for Johnson & Johnson’s consumer sector, she led the division through recalls, shutdowns of manufacturing facilities, and a consent decree. At both

Desiree RallsMorrison

Executive Vice President, Chief Legal Officer and Corporate Secretary at McDonalds

Boehringer Ingelheim and Boston Scientific, she developed a reputation as a business adviser who happened to also have legal expertise.

John C. Hueston, partner at Hueston Hennigan, emphasizes Ralls-Morrison’s large achievements through her professional journey. “Desiree possesses the perfect balance of wisdom and courage as general counsel: she relishes making the tough calls but always ensures that every key decision is roundly vetted and not driven by passion of the moment,” he says.

Throughout her career, she was equally committed to effecting change in communities through pro bono work. But after the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, she and many of her peers started reevaluating how they wanted to contribute. Their conversations paved the way to the New Commonwealth Racial Equity and Social Justice Fund, which raises funds for Black and Brown nonprofit organizations in Massachusetts.

As a founding member and adviser to the foundation, Ralls-Morrison says the effort was empowering.

“It allowed us to realize that we really do have the political clout and the financial means to raise money and use our influence in ways we hadn’t thought to before,” she says. “People often ask what they can do during their rise up the corporate ladder, but we all have some value to add, even before you’ve reached that top position. The truth is you can do something. You just have to realize the power you have.”

Proskauer:

“Desiree is a smart, thoughtful, and strategic general counsel. She is detail-oriented yet always remains focused on the big picture. It has been a pleasure to work with her on some of McDonald’s most challenging matters.”

—Nigel F. Telman, Partner

Shipman & Goodwin:

“Desiree is a talented creative lawyer and business leader who leads and inspires by example. Shipman is proud to have had her as a colleague, and we are even prouder to call her a friend.”

—Mark K. Ostrowski, Partner

Shook, Hardy, and Bacon:

"What sets Desiree apart is her integrity and brilliant management skills, overseeing lawyers from across the globe with different perspectives and creating a single team to achieve a common goal for the company. Desiree has created a successful blueprint that she carries wherever she goes.”

—Robert Simpson, Managing Partner

Bravo. Well Done.

CONGRATULATIONS TO DESIREE RALLS-MORRISON, Executive Vice President, Chief Legal Officer and Corporate Secretary of McDonald’s Corporation, on this outstanding recognition by Modern Counsel. Perkins Coie applauds Desiree’s innovative leadership and the strong example that she sets for others.

PerkinsCoie.com

AVisionaryLeader

Paul, Weiss applauds Desiree RallsMorrison, Executive Vice President, Chief Legal Officer and Corporate Secretary at McDonald’s, for her leadership of a global team and their myriad accomplishments. We deeply value our partnership with Desiree and McDonald’s and look forward to continuing to support their strategic legal and business initiatives.

wilmerhale.com

Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr llp

“ The Ultim a t e

A Culture of Care at Baker Hughes

Victor Wright shares his passion for service and his efforts to work with others to improve the employee experience at Baker Hughes

By Noah Johnson

WHEN REFLECTING ON WHAT VICTOR

Wright’s legacy will be by the end of his decorated career, there’s no shortage of possible answers.

One might conclude that he was a protector and an advocate, designations he earned in the US Air Force as a prosecutor, criminal defense, labor and employment, environmental, and contract law attorney. Judging from his private practice and in-house roles, others might say that he was a thought leader who helped clients navigate their most complex employment-related issues by balancing legal advice with insights that created cultures of care.

If you ask the leader himself, two titles fit: public servant and supportive leader.

“Over time, you learn that it isn’t about you and its more about the greater cause you’re a part of. You have to be humble, learn about teamwork, self-awareness, and that taking care of your team is important,” he says. “If you take care of others, they will support you and follow you to the ends of the earth. A mentor once told me that when you create a culture of truth and care among your team, people will follow you even if it’s just out of curiosity.”

After leveraging that perspective at KBR Inc., Wright brought it to Baker Hughes as vice president of labor and employment law. He stepped into the role at a pivotal time, when the company was in the middle of large-scale global transformation. For years, it had taken steps to lead in the energy

Victor Wright VP of Global Labor & Employment Law Baker Hughes

A Passion for Service

Wright’s passion for service extends outside of Baker Hughes. Here are some of his civic commitments:

1. Board of Trustee Member of Presbyterian School of Houston

2. Board Member and Past President of the University of Houston Law Center Alumni Association

3. Board Member and Immediate Past Chair of the Houston Law Review Board of Directors

4. Board Member and Past Chair of the Labor and Employment Practice Group for Association of Corporate Counsel Houston Chapter

5. Mentor at University of Houston Law Center

transition and to become more of an energy technology company through key acquisitions. That kind of change brought its fair share of complex HR and employment law issues. It necessitated a leader like Wright to lead a global team of lawyers and paralegals spread out across several geographic regions with legal oversight responsibilities for employees located in more than 120 countries.

When he began his tenure at the company, he knew the organization’s energy transition goals would be paved with strong relationships and mutual confidence and trust between him and his business partners. That’s why he filled his days with virtual coffee meetings, in-person lunches, and face-to-face listening sessions. He wanted to understand the needs of the organization and how he could play a role in addressing them.

“It was really important that I came in and established myself as someone who was not overly conservative, who had the right legal risk and business mindset, and who could prioritize helping the business meet its goals,” he says.

Safe to say his approach paid off. First, senior leadership entrusted him with the responsibility of leading and developing a labor and employee relations center of excellence, while most companies would normally just report to HR. Then, he was selected to be the global enterprise leader for Baker Hughes’s veterans employee resource group. Building on those responsibilities, he has started working closely with the company’s chief diversity officer

We congratulate Victor V. Wright, Vice President, Global Labor & Employment Law at Baker Hughes, on his accomplishments and recognition.

We are proud to partner with Victor and Baker Hughes in moving energy forward.

More than just nationwide expertise in labor and employment law, Kullman has Next-Level Know-How SM .

Next-Level Labor & Employment Lawyers.

kullmanlaw.com

to reevaluate and reaffirm diversity, equity, and inclusion commitments in the aftermath of the US Supreme Court’s recent decision.

Additionally, has gotten a chance to play a role in shaping company culture, influencing leaders on how they value their employees.

“I’ve tried to make sure we’re living up to our values. One way has been telling folks about the consequences of not creating a culture of empathy and of caring about people,” he says. “It leads to disputes and harmful employee relations issues that comes from that. It behooves us not just because of the business implications but because employees are more productive when they’re cared for.”

That perspective has become even more critical as the organization is streamlining and optimizing its business operations.

Aspiring leaders should also set goals and be willing to put in the work to meet them, Wright advises. “What are you willing to become? Be willing to put in the work, stay humble, and treat people with dignity and respect along the way,” Wright says.

Such young leaders should also realize that they can’t make it on their own.

“My advice is to build meaningful and impactful relationships [and] have good mentors and sponsors that are invested in you. And when you have that, never forget that you also have an obligation to invest in the aspiring leaders coming behind you,” Wright says.

Kullman:

“Victor is an outstanding L&E attorney who always combines a keen legal intellect with a successful strategic approach.  He is true leader and great to work with: authentic, tenacious, creative, and pragmatic.”

—Sam Zurik III,

Shareholder

How to Fail Within Reason

Jourdan Cabe Ball always wanted to serve others. After finding her passions for labor and employment law and the food industry, she got her chance.

By Noah Johnson

WHEN JOURDAN CABE BALL REFLECTS on what drew her to a career in law, she thinks of a family experience that left an indelible impression.

“When I was very young, my grandmother passed away tragically and there was a wrongful death suit related to the incident,” she recalls. “My grandpa didn’t have a ton of money to afford a good attorney, and he was fighting against a corporation with deep pockets. He settled for pennies on what he could’ve gotten.”

While her grandfather didn’t get the justice he deserved, Ball decided to pursue law school to help others get a fair shake. After the North Carolina native earned her undergraduate degree in political science, she earned her law degree from North Carolina Central University.

After she passed the bar, she had her eyes on environmental law and was slated to fulfill her public service aspirations at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). But when funding for the intended

position dried up, the opportunity fell through, and she was forced to reevaluate her legal path. That’s when she received an offer to work in-house at The Fresh Market, an American chain of supermarkets based in Greensboro, North Carolina.

The role not only jumpstarted her passions for legal compliance and labor and employment matters, but also opened her eyes to the impact she could make in an industry that had been a part of her journey all along.

“Nearly every paying job I’ve held since sixteen has been in the food industry, and I’ve noticed that there’s something special about the people drawn to food,” she shares. “The professionals in the industry genuinely want to serve people and put them first. There’s a keen interest in making connections through

food, focusing on our customers every day—and that’s true in the legal department, too.”

After serving nearly four years at The Fresh Market, Ball brought her passion for the industry to Compass Group USA, where over three hundred thousand associates serve thirteen million meals daily, including ninety-nine of Fortune’s top hundred companies. The leader says that the same thing that attracted her to the company is what scared her the most about it: its complex corporate structure.

The company has prided itself on allowing each of its twenty-seven subsidiaries to shine as their own business. The strategy is a brilliant yet challenging aspect of the company that makes the life of an employment and compliance expert like Ball incredibly complex.

Jourdan Cabe Ball Senior Corporate Counsel Compass Group

“From a compliance perspective, you have twenty-seven different companies, and they have twenty-seven distinct personalities, twenty-seven different approaches, and twenty-seven strategies on business,” says Ball. “It is, more often than not, challenging to homogenize a compliance process, but I thought that if I could be successful here, I could be successful anywhere.”

Today, she serves as senior corporate counsel and manages and supports the company’s employment compliance. Her team’s coverage spans all fifty states plus Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. In that capacity, her practices cover numerous areas, including wage and hour, pre-employment screening, hiring, talent acquisition, compensation, federal contracting, prevailing wage, immigration, and more.

Ball has also helped streamline its compliance processes, created an internal employment compliance resource, and developed an internal podcast. For Ball, a huge focus has been on coming up with creative ways to support the company’s managers.

“Our managers are busy; their plates are full. My focus is, and always will be, on a single idea—how can we communicate complex legal ideas in a digestible way so that it is understandable, easy to follow, and even easier to maintain?” she says. “My big focuses include effective communications, streamlined processes and automation, and creativity in risk reduction, all while [being] cognizant of a manager’s time and resources. My team does an incredible

Jack Robert

“Nothing is lost when I am lighting others’ candles; it only makes the company and the individual stronger. I’m there the entire time to support and will let them make reasonable mistakes to learn why a certain strategy may not work.”

job at thinking outside the box in those areas.”

As a leader, Ball says she “wants my people to be themselves, whatever that means.” She also wants them to prioritize work/life balance and to “fail within reason.”

“I like to see my team push themselves. If a junior associate has an opportunity to work on something they’re not familiar with, or there’s an opportunity for them to learn a new subject matter, then I want them to take a stab at it,” she says. “I want to see their thought process and perspective. I want to see them grow. Nothing is lost when I am lighting others’ candles; it only makes the company and the individual stronger. I’m there the entire time to support and will let them make reasonable mistakes to

learn why a certain strategy may not work.”

Ball believes 2024 will be a “year of big growth,” both for the company and for herself.

“I’m looking forward to focusing more on the bigger picture as a leader and how we drive compliance from a commercial perspective. Compliance doesn’t have to be a drain on resources, and my goal is to integrate compliance into everything we do. I’m taking more steps every day to have that kind of role, and I’m looking forward to where that leads,” she says.

Fisher & Phillips LLP:

“Jourdan’s

—Lonnie D. Giamela, Partner

Changing the Employment Equation

With almost 600 attorneys in 41 offices across the United States and Mexico, Fisher Phillips is an international labor and employment firm providing practical business solutions for employers’ workplace legal problems. We regularly advise and counsel clients on issues surrounding wage and hour, employment discrimination and harassment, litigation, workplace safety, immigration, trade secrets and non-competes, and more.

fisherphillips.com

The Litigation

How nine attorneys face the challenges that come with litigation to best defend their companies

NO. 52 | BOB TRONNES; EBAY

NO. 66 | DIPO ASHIRU; VERITAS CAPITAL

NO. 63 | JOSEPH KELLER; LOCKHEED MARTIN

NO. 60 | HILARY BARRETT; PENN ENTERTAINMENT

Litigation Issue

NO. 80 | KEVIN LARNER; AIG

NO. 76 | MASAI-MALIEK KING; STATE STREET CORPORATION

NO. 84 | JAN FINK CALL; DSM-FIRMENICH

NO. 90 | REBECCA LETOURNEAUX; WILLIAM BLAIR

NO. 94 | SCHOLASTICA BAKER; MCDONALD'S CORPORATION

Bob Tronnes helps ensure that eBay’s belief that people are basically good continues to thrive

Good to the Bone

BY Billy Yost

PORTRAITS BY Jyotsna Bhamidipati

CONCEPT PHOTOGRAPHY BY Cass Davis

AT THE SAME TIME BOB TRONNES was considering going to eBay over ten years ago, he was also in the late stages of heading back into public sector work. The litigator on behalf of well-known, multinational firms like O’Melveny & Myers and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom had accomplished great things. Still, the son of two public school teachers had an ingrained passion for work on behalf of the general public, and he was in the final stages of interviews for the United States Attorney’s Office in San Francisco (USAO).

“In the middle of that interview process, the USAO instituted a hiring freeze,” Tronnes says. “It felt like my last chance to build a career in the public sphere, and suddenly I found myself at eBay wondering if I would be spending my time mitigating disputes between buyers and sellers.”

That was over a decade ago. While buyer and seller disputes continue to play a role in Tronnes’s day-to-day, he’s discovered that resolving them is far more meaningful than expected. And fol-

“When we have new people always a little confused at how know so much about each other. are so many running jokes finishing each other’s sentences might feel a little intimidating, work hard to make new teammates feel at home amongst a team done a lot of great things together.”

lowing three promotions into his current role as associate general counsel and head of global litigation, he’s built a team that has a reputation for finishing each other’s sentences, that is committed, and, at its heart, has a mission of helping others find those secret treasures they simply cannot find anywhere else.

The Belief That People Are Good

For a company that may be lumped in with other dot-com boom companies of the early 2000s, eBay, which was actually founded in 1995, is unique because while its evolution has been constant, it’s never endeavored to become an “everything” business.

“At its core, I know this company is trying to empower small businesses and give people opportunities they wouldn’t otherwise have,” Tronnes explains. “[eBay founder] Pierre Omidyar said very early on that eBay is based on the idea that people are basically good. And if they’re good, you can trust them to engage in these transactions in a way that will work.”

Omidyar couldn’t have imagined creating a marketplace that today has roughly two billion live listings, but his belief in people has proven true more often than not. While the legal team may be forced to grapple with some of the more challenging consequences of that view, the tenure of the legal team

EXPERTISE SPOTLIGHT

Greenberg Traurig, LLP has more than 2,650 attorneys in 47 locations in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, and Asia. The firm is a 2022 BTI “Highly Recommended Law Firm” for superior client service and is consistently among the top firms on the Am Law Global 100 and NLJ 500. Greenberg Traurig is Mansfield Rule 6.0 Certified Plus by the Diversity Lab. The firm is recognized for powering its US offices with 100 percent renewable energy as certified by the Center for Resource Solutions’ Green-e® Energy program and is a member of the US EPA’s Green Power Partnership Program. The firm is known for its philanthropic giving, innovation, diversity, and pro bono work.

NAME BOB TRONNES

illustrates a belief in the mission, a love for the work, and a strong bond among its community.

While new people continue to join the team, Tronnes, Vice President of Legal Aaron Johnson, and Senior Director of Litigation Allison Marrazzo have worked together almost uninterrupted for the past eighteen years since they were all associates at O’Melveny & Myers. Long tenure is a similar theme for many on the litigation team whose members have spent years, if not decades, with the company.

Jeff Wall, litigation partner and head of the Supreme Court and appellate practice at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP, highlights Tronnes’s strong leadership and litigation skills that lead to eBay’s success. “Bob can handle any problem,” he says. “He understands litigation from the courtroom side and the business side, he cares deeply about getting to the right place, and he’s able to lead teams there on a range of difficult issues.”

“When we have new people join, they’re always a little confused at how we know so

much about each other,” Tronnes says. “There are so many running jokes and people finishing each other’s sentences that it might feel a little intimidating, but we work hard to make new teammates feel at home amongst a team that has done a lot of great things together.”

Part of the team’s longevity might be linked to the company’s early investment and understanding that a legal team is far more than a cost center. Tronnes says introducing an ediscovery function early on was a gamechanger for making in-house litigation counsel more effective in their roles. “That early adoption of e-discovery and building some bespoke solutions that really address specific data collection preservation challenges at eBay has been very, very impressive to me,” Tronnes says.

Tronnes also has an ability to spot future trends and technologies. “Bob is a very strategic thinker who understands how to manage litigation in a way that protects users

and sellers on the eBay platform and advances the interests of the company,” says Ian C. Ballon, cochair of global intellectual property and technology practice group at Greenberg Traurig LLP. “He understands the importance of developing new law in emerging areas. And he always takes a longterm view, considering trends in the law and broader policy objectives. He is a pleasure to work with, has a great sense of humor, and works very hard to achieve the best possible results for his internal clients.”

Something New

One of Tronnes’s early successes at eBay was in his second year when he was asked to take over a complex and costly business dispute that had been going on for years prior to Tronnes joining the company.

The case was so messy that it had its own inertia, bogging down all parties with no foreseeable way out, and, understandably, little passion about getting it resolved.

Within twelve months of Tronnes being assigned the project, eBay had successfully settled the case. He’s first to point out that it wasn’t just him, but his involvement was critical.

“I suggested some new strategies for the litigation to get the other side’s as well as the court’s attention in ways that hadn’t been tried previously,” Tronnes remembers. “It increased the stakes. At the same time, we worked to educate the opposing side that there were present and long-term challenges that were going to have to be addressed that they might [not] have given much thought to before.”

Tronnes not only can work well with opposing counsel, but also can delegate

appropriately with outside counsel. “Bob has been a friend of King & Spalding for several years, and through our relationship we’ve learned firsthand that he is a great lawyer, leader, client, and friend,” say Ethan Davis, Craig Carpenito, and Damien Marshall, who are partners at King & Spalding.

At present, Tronnes says differentiating eBay’s business model from other e-commerce companies is one of the more challenging parts of his role because many litigation opponents have incentives to refuse to recognize the differences in business models or the challenges applying thirty-year-old laws to a pure third-party marketplace present. While it can be challenging, Tronnes believes it's rewarding work.

Ten years ago, Tronnes might have wound up on the other side of those conversations, but he and a tight team have found a mission that they can connect to. In a difficult and complex world, eBay is still operating with the idea that people are fundamentally good. The fact that the company remains a giant in its field should give us all a little more faith in humanity.

Holland & Knight LLP:

“Through his leadership, Bob fosters and maintains the close-knit culture, collaborative approach, and incredible work ethic of the eBay legal team. We are honored to work with Bob and celebrate his welldeserved recognition by Modern Counsel.”

—Judith M. Mercier, Partner

Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP:

“Weil is proud of its longstanding partnership with Bob Tronnes and the entire team at eBay, and we congratulate him on this well-deserved recognition.”

—David Lender, Cochair, Global Litigation Department

Greenberg Traurig Congratulates Bob Tronnes of eBay. We applaud the leadership and accomplishments to Bob Tronnes, Head of Global Litigation at eBay. We are

King & Spalding congratulates Bob Tronnes on his well-deserved recognition by Modern Counsel for his leadership at eBay.

kslaw.com

When Adaptability

Table Stakes Is

BY <Yost, Billy>

Barrett handles multiple industries at once at PENN Entertainment

Fortunately, that’s what Barrett, the VP of employment and litigation at PENN Entertainment, loves about her job the most. The variety of in-house work is unrivaled, especially at PENN. It’s not just a gaming, hospitality, food and beverage, hotel, finance, interactive, or retail-specific industry. It’s all of them combined. On any given day, Barrett is tackling wage and hour issues for tipped workers, litigating income and property tax matters, and negotiating with various labor unions.

Hilary

HILARY BARRETT HIRED A DIRECT report eighteen months back. PENN Entertainment is the lawyer’s first in-house role, and Barrett provided some wise advice that she herself got when initially going in-house for the first time.

“I told her exactly the same thing that I was told: ‘You aren’t going to feel like you know what you’re doing for at least six months,’” Barrett says. “Practicing in-house is wildly different than acting as outside counsel, and it takes some time to understand the business.”

Fortunately, that’s what Barrett, the vice president of employment and litigation at PENN Entertainment, loves about her job the most. The variety of in-house work is unrivaled, especially at PENN. It’s not just a gaming, hospitality, food and beverage, hotel, finance, interactive, or retail-specific industry. It’s all of those combined. On any given day, Barrett is tackling wage and hour issues for tipped workers, litigating income and property tax matters, and negotiating with various labor unions.

“I’ve either been in-house or outside counsel in the gaming and hospitality industry for my entire career,” the VP explains. “Obviously, Las Vegas is the right city for me to be in, and I have over twenty years of experience doing this work. But I still learn something new every day. That’s the kind of job you dream about having.”

Throughout her career, Barrett says she’s been blessed with the kind of mentors who were willing to give her hard truths and throw her in the deep end. The VP says those mentors provided stretch opportunities to branch out into work she hadn’t done before

NAME HILARY BARRETT

TITLE VP OF EMPLOYMENT & LITIGATION

and were willing to take a gamble on a younger attorney who believed she could rise to the task at hand.

“Having a leader who identifies where your growth opportunities are helps you recognize the kind of development you should pursue,” Barrett says. “I’m a firm subscriber to the belief that you hire good people and get out of their way because those are the kind of leaders that mentored me. I’m candid with the people I hire, I look for ways they can grow, and I act as their safety net if they need it.”

The variety of work is almost as wide as the challenges Barrett oversees in her role. Operating in the gaming space makes navigating complex regulation high stakes, but then one must consider that those regulations are different in every jurisdiction in which

the company operates, and every property PENN owns may run its operations slightly different to comply with those regulations and other local laws.

Minute details like how table games are staffed from location to location can vary widely, and Barrett needs to be a de facto expert on all of it. And the variety of industry that Barrett loves so much? For her, that means multiple business units are encompassed in a single company, creating exponentially more stakeholders all with a different view of their business.

Then consider the ramp-up of the interactive gaming space. It’s an entirely different world, and PENN has been doubling down on its presence.

“I have not worked for a gaming or hospitality company that has such a robust online presence and interactive

& Lee congratulates our client and friend, Hilary Barrett, for her recognition by Modern Counsel and her contributions to Penn Entertainment’s ongoing success.

“Practicing in-house is wildly different than acting as outside counsel, and it takes some time to understand the business.”

division,” Barrett says. “That’s forced me to learn the tech industry and examine how those dynamic layers lay on top of everything else.”

As Barrett has continued to seek out challenging roles in her career, she’s also taken the time to help cultivate the next generation of Hilary Barretts. She was asked to teach a hospitality law class at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas that encompassed everything from innkeeper rights to security standards to health and safety. Barrett admits that she herself had to brush up on some of the law and probably reviewed the textbook as hard as the undergrads she was teaching.

While Barrett doesn’t really have much spare time, she has still found time to devote to The Shade Tree of Las Vegas over the last six years. The Shade Tree is a shelter for women and children fleeing domestic violence and has been servicing the Las Vegas area for forty years. Barrett is a board member for the nonprofit and says the mission of the organization has remained close to her heart.

There is one other area, among the dozens, in which Barrett has become

proficient in the last handful of years. The wife and mother has made it to a point in her career where she can unplug when she needs to and enjoy her life outside of work.

“My humorous out-of-office memos are a running joke here internally,” Barrett says, laughing. “I didn’t always have the luxury of being able to set those boundaries, but I do now. I worked hard to get to where I am and have always been willing to go above and beyond to get there. But kids grow up so fast, and I want to be there to see them grow up. Part of what I had to learn was the humility to realize that I don’t have to be the one to do everything. If it’s not something I can add value to, maybe I can let someone else do it who can gain some experience from the process. I think that’s part of maturing, and it’s taken a lot of time to get here.”

But should you wish to contact Barrett while she’s out, you might be greeted with, “Sorry I’m not available to respond to your message. I’m on a beach with a drink in my hand and the sun in my face.” The VP has earned it.

Joseph Keller Serves in His Own Way

Joseph Keller comes from a long line of those who put their lives on the line for the sake of the country’s safety. At Lockheed Martin, he’s aiming to support that mission in the legal department.

BY Noah Johnson

AS AN ASSOCIATE GENERAL COUNSEL

at Lockheed Martin, Joseph “Joe" Keller has the unique opportunity to serve those who serve the country and to contribute to their mission in his own way. It’s the perfect role for Keller, who grew up surrounded by loved ones who answered the call to protect and defend.

“Even though I didn’t serve, pretty much everyone else in my family did,” shares Keller, a Chicagoland native. “My grandfather was in World War II. My dad and my uncle were in Vietnam. My stepdad, a

former Navy officer, is career military and very passionate about it to this day, always keeping his gear around the house. I view myself as having a small role in that bigger picture. I'm passionate about working with Lockheed Martin, knowing that our efforts directly contribute to supporting our military customers and ultimately defending our nation. It helps motivate me to get out of bed each morning.”

Since 2019, Keller has supported missile warning satellite efforts, missile defense programs, and more. Currently, he is lead

counsel for the Lockheed Martin Space business area’s sensing and warning mission segment, a vital business that supports critical national security missions. His support of the company’s national security space and strategy and business development includes investment pursuits, business capture activities, and M&A initiatives.

Giving Back through Leadership

Beyond Keller’s responsibilities as an advisor to the business and its clients, he makes an effort to be a mentor and an effective leader to the attorneys he works with. This often takes the form of helping early-career professionals advance and get opportunities to promote themselves, even if they come from outside the company.

NAME JOSEPH “JOE” KELLER

TITLE

ASSOCIATE GENERAL

COUNSEL OF NATIONAL SECURITY SPACE & STRATEGY AND BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT FOR LOCKHEED MARTIN SPACE

One piece of advice Keller often imparts to aspiring or young attorneys is to specialize early in their career.

“If I could go back, I would have tried to specialize in a particular industry. That’s the key,” Keller emphasizes. “If you have that niche or that area of expertise, then you will be in demand.”

When Keller isn’t pushing others toward growth through mentorship and advice, he’s doing it through his leadership style. He places an emphasis on leading by example, and he inspires his colleagues to do the same.

“Leadership is a matter of showing your own personal responsibility for everything you do in the workplace, owning each project,” he shares.

COMPANY

LOCKHEED

MARTIN

Chris Finetti

From Research to the Courtroom

Keller’s interest in law began with a proclivity toward researching and writing. When he began to study law at the University of Michigan, he grew fond of litigation. That passion deepened during a federal clerkship at the Eastern District of Virginia. His studies and his clerkship gave him the legal chops he’d need to become a litigation associate at O’Melveny & Myers in New York, where he focused on global investigations and white-collar defense matters.

After three years in that role, Keller became a trial attorney for the Department of Justice in Washington, DC. As part of his practice as a government contracts litigator, he represented federal entities like the US Army and the Department of Energy. From there, he moved to the Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA), a Department of Defense agency. Keller says those roles helped him become more poised and confident under pressure.

“When you’ve been in courtroom battles, the little things don’t matter,” Keller says. “I’ve been in situations where opposing counsel are attacking my witness. I’ve learned to stay calm by remembering the kind of behavior that will and won’t hurt my team.”

An Interest That Leads to National Service

Throughout that journey, Keller became more and more interested in defense contracting.

“It’s a really fascinating area of law,” he says. “It’s a highly regulated industry with a lot of rules, and the industry itself is so important to our nation.”

Keller’s interests took him back to Chicago, where he became chief counsel for the DCMA office in the city and took his government contracts law expertise even further.

Soon after, Lockheed Martin tapped him to join its ranks. Keller was drawn to the role, not only because of the company’s reputation as the top aerospace and defense organization in the world, but also because of the opportunity “to be embedded in the business.”

“In my current role, I collaborate with program managers, program finance, contracts, and supply chain experts. That’s what I really like about being in-house versus at a law firm,” Keller says. “In a law firm setting, you’re basically just a hired gun and you kind of parachute in, do what they ask you to do, and then leave. At Lockheed Martin, I’m part of the team, and we’re supporting customers that are doing important things for national security.”

Dentons is privileged to work with Joe and the rest of the Lockheed Martin team as the company continues to advance scientific discovery and deliver innovative solutions that help their customers keep people safe.

the law firm of the future is here.

A Role to Navigate with Flexibility

BY Zach Baliva

Dipo Ashiru gives a behind-the-scenes look at the role of general counsel and shares how he prepared himself to lead all things legal at Veritas Capital

Peter Garritano

TITLE

GENERAL

COUNSEL AND CHIEF COMPLIANCE OFFICER

DIPO ASHIRU

NONE OF DIPO ASHIRU’S CHILDHOOD friends can believe he became a lawyer. In fact, he’s kind of surprised about it himself. It’s not because Ashiru doesn’t have the personality, skills, or aptitude for it—he does. It’s because Ashiru was once very certain he would become a doctor.

Ashiru partially attributes his former goal to a combination of family expectations and innate curiosity. He grew up in Nigeria as one of five siblings eager to please parents by pursuing respected and lucrative careers. As his older siblings took accounting, architecture, and aerospace engineering, a coveted spot as physician remained.

As the son of an entomologist, Ashiru was fascinated by the natural world. He dutifully enrolled into biology and premed classes only to experience academic fatigue in his senior year as eight combined years of medical school and residency loomed. He took the LSAT to reflect and buy himself time to figure life out but received something more: a high score that suddenly put top law schools within reach.

The young student was already accustomed to studying at top schools. He attended a rigorous military boarding school at age eleven, moved to Norway at sixteen on a scholarship to complete an international baccalaure -

ate program, and got another full ride to study biology and political science at Franklin & Marshall College. For his juris doctor, he chose Columbia Law School. The esteemed institution counts three US Chief Justices among its graduates.

His upbringing taught Ashiru the values of hard work and perseverance as he learned to be a self-sufficient problemsolver. Few of his Columbia classmates grew up navigating daily power outages, carrying buckets of water home on their heads, and ironing their own school uniforms.

After his first year of law school, Ashiru remained uncertain about his future. “I believed I could use a law degree to do something good for the world, but I needed to find out what and how,” he says. The desire compelled the ambitious student to try public interest law clinics, where he helped domestic violence victims, housing court petitioners, and political asylum seekers.

Instead of finding his niche, Ashiru grew jaded about the glacial pace of change within broken systems. He sampled corporate law at Debevoise as a 2L and accidentally found his way to private equity funds where he fell in love with the complex negotiations and investment partnership dynamics.

As he built his career, Ashiru developed a new goal: to become a general

“I believed I could use a law degree to do something good for the world, but I needed to find out what and how.”

skills,

EXPERTISE SPOTLIGHT

Gibson Dunn is a leading global law firm, advising clients on significant transactions and disputes around the world. With more than 1,900 lawyers spanning 21 offices and dozens of practice areas, we operate as a unified whole.

Our global M&A practice, ranked by Chambers USA as “Elite,” is built on over 130 years of partnering with our clients to fulfill their business objectives through opportunistic acquisitions and timely dispositions. Our exceptional team has been recognized by Legal 500 for their “large M&A” deals. Our lawyers are dedicated to legal strategies that are meticulously tailored to every matter. This level of service is imbedded in the firm’s culture, with one M&A client commenting, “The Gibson Dunn team is very practical and business-oriented. They understand what matters most.”

You don’t have to be everything, but you do have every answer.”

grow your you’re weak, and

counsel. Knowing that he needed to make considerable sacrifices to put himself in the right position, he left the law firm environment to broaden his legal skills. First stop was KKR, a large private equity firm and later TCW, a respected asset manager.

After six years as associate general counsel at the TCW Group, Ashiru was ready for a lead role. Following several attempts, he found success. Ashiru joined Veritas Capital as general counsel and chief compliance officer in 2021.

Ashiru stepped into his new role and felt like a rookie lawyer again, working sixteen to eighteen hours a day. But he relished the “rare and special” opportunity to build his own legal team.

He first hired a transactional lawyer to support Veritas’ complex deals. Then, he brought in a compliance director. After adding a few support staff positions and aligning outside counsel to his vision, Ashiru rounded out his “team of eight superstars” by bringing in his last hire: a private funds lawyer. “Complementarity and redundancy are important on any team,” he says. “No single person is so important that the firm can’t function without them.”

John Pollack, partner and private equity cochair of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, recognizes Ashiru’s significant contributions to Veritas. “Veritas prides itself on excellence, deal speed, and great decision-making,” he says. “No surprise that Dipo is a perfect fit. It’s a pleasure to work with him he pushes us to provide the best service we can.”

Today, Ashiru and his team are supporting an entrepreneurial-minded enterprise undergoing rapid growth.

Veritas recently launched its own broker-dealer and has over $40 billion in assets under management. As a perennial top performer in a competitive landscape, for Veritas to continue to deliver exceptional returns as it expands, its attorneys will have to do more than simply provide sound legal support.

Ashiru and his team are putting the proper protocols in place to guide Veritas in its ongoing evolution as it adopts generative AI, launches new products, automates formerly manual processes, anticipates cyberthreats, and operates in an ever-shifting regulatory landscape.

For others who share Ashiru’s leadership ambitions, his advice is simple. “Expand your skills, grow your networks, know where you’re weak, and communicate well,” he says. “You don’t have to be an expert in everything, but you do have to know where to find every answer.”

Almost three years into his role, Ashiru is thriving. He says Veritas Capital should get a lot of credit for that.

“I hire really good people and then get out of their way, and I’ve benefited from like-minded colleagues who prioritize excellence and rely on me to deliver and lead,” he explains. Ashiru’s approach? He ingratiates himself to his fellow leaders by trying to solve the problems that bother them the most each day.

“Dipo is a force. He is a dynamic and collaborative leader and mentor who

EXPERTISE SPOTLIGHT

As the largest, most active private investment funds practice of any law firm in the world, Kirkland’s Investment Funds Group is the market leader in full-service legal advisory services to investment fund sponsors and global investors. The group has attorneys operating out of sixteen cities in major financial centers—and deep teams in all complementary practice areas— enabling Kirkland to serve private equity firms with complex transactions around the world.

Kirkland clients benefit from world-class global regulatory advice and a full suite of specialists in every specialty from fund-level credit facilities to secondaries to succession planning, ESG, and more. In the last five years, Kirkland has advised clients on over 1,900 funds closed and in process, exceeded $2.17 trillion in total commitments—more than any other law firm globally. Our clients range from renowned private equity firms to emerging managers, and the firm has a long-standing commitment to representing more middlemarket and smaller managers than any other law firm. We also benefit from world-class lawyers who are specialists in almost every asset class within the private fund formation universe.

brings his remarkable energy and commitment to every endeavor,” says Nicole Washington, P.C., partner at Kirkland & Ellis LLP. “He is a pragmatic problem-solver, a skilled consensus-builder, and an accomplished strategist. It has been incredible to watch Dipo grow and develop the talented legal team at Veritas. My colleagues and I have been fortunate to work alongside Dipo and his amazing team, and we look forward to seeing all of their continued successes and accomplishments under Dipo’s leadership.”

At work, at home, or anywhere in between, Ashiru is finding ways to make a difference. Whether serving on the Prison Fellowship Board of Directors an organization that provides resources for and restores prisoners, their families, and others impacted by incarceration or serving meals to the homeless as a volunteer with City Relief.

Last year, Fortune listed Veritas CEO Ramzi Musallam among its twenty-one most powerful players shaping the $8 trillion private equity industry. Musallam has taken the firm’s managed assets from $2 billion to $40 billion. Veritas recently finished a deal to acquire Syneos Health and closed its eighth flagship fund with commitments topping $10.5 billion. As more players focus on software and technology-enabled solutions, Musallam and others are predicting big things for Veritas in 2024 and beyond. Ashiru and his team are ready to keep the organization moving forward.

Covington:

“We are proud to work closely with Dipo and his colleagues at Veritas Capital. Dipo is a pleasure to work with. We particularly appreciate his thoughtful and practical approach to challenging legal and regulatory matters.”

—Scott Freling, Partner

Dipo Ashiru

Covington has the honor of working with and the broader Veritas Capital team. We applaud Dipo’s strong leadership and solutions-oriented approach.

A Mission to Serve

Masai-Maliek King shares the impact he had as a criminal prosecutor for two decades and how he’s leveraging those skills in a new chapter of his career journey

BY Noah Johnson

Masai-Maliek King spent twenty-five years as a criminal prosecutor in Suffolk County, Massachusetts, before becoming vice president and litigation counsel at the Massachusetts-based financial services company State Street. As an assistant district attorney in the largest prosecutor’s office in New England, King helped build bridges between the community and an often-misunderstood profession.

“People always think prosecutors just want to lock people up, but that’s not true of the ones I’ve worked with. In my former office, we tried to be tough on crime but also cognizant of the communities, the victims, and the defendants we served,” King says.

“My parents engrained in me that if you can help somebody, help somebody. Particularly, if you can help someone who’s Black get into a better situation that’ll benefit them and generations down the line, do that.”

As a Black man working in predominately Black or minority neighborhoods, he understood the importance of having a

person of color in the courtroom on the prosecution side, King explains. “I hoped it would give people some comfort that fair recommendations would be made on their case,” he says.

King’s mission to serve his community often had life-changing implications. When he was assigned gang cases that ultimately could not proceed in court, he gave his card to each defendant, asking if they needed help getting a job or if they just wanted someone to talk to. One instance stands out to the leader: six young men were involved in an altercation that led to a shootout. King dismissed the matters when the evidence changed post indictment. King received a phone call from one of the young men involved.

“The young man said he didn’t like the path he was heading down and wanted to work. So, I connected him with a colleague I knew in the construction business,” King remembers. “He went on to work with him for a few years, but after that I lost touch with him.”

Several years later, King was at the zoo with his family when the young man approached him. He introduced King to his son and his wife. King still remembers what he said.

“‘Thank you for giving me a break all those years ago,’” King recalls. “The biggest thing to me was that he was still alive. Seeing him as a family man in a better place in his life was the perfect moment for me.”

After decades of changing and transforming lives, King was ready for a change himself.

“If you have the same meal every day for twenty years, you get really good at making it,” he says. “If you’re out of ingredients, you can still make it happen to the point where you don’t even think about it anymore. When people came to me with questions or problems, you know how to solve them. To me, that wasn’t satisfying; I wanted a challenge that would allow me to use my skill set but also give me the opportunity to do something I hadn’t done before.”

In 2023, he got that opportunity at State Street, a global bank offering a multitude of financial services headquartered in Boston with operations worldwide. While working in a large bank isn’t as sexy as criminal law, it still requires him to leverage the skills he used as a high performing prosecutor, including the ability to build relationships.

Ropes & Gray is proud to serve the legal and business needs of Masai-Maliek King

Vice President and Litigation Counsel State Street

A Valued Partner

Nixon Peabody LLP congratulates our client, Masai-Maliek King of State Street, on this welldeserved recognition highlighting his outstanding career.

We are honored to work with with Masai and the State Street team on legal ma ers that impact their business.

“Building relationships both inside and outside of State Street has been one of my proudest accomplishments so far. This is a relationship business just like criminal law,” King explains.

“That’s how coworkers trust you and how clients trust you. You give your word, and that’s all the integrity you have; you have to follow through with what you have said you will do.”

Some of his other highlights have included being part of an internal DEI subcommittee, which has helped to put on panel discussions about important diversity issues. Moving forward, he wants not only to expand on that work, but also to get more experience outside of litigation, including on the business side of the bank.

King believes that young people seeking success should focus on preparation.

“If you’re prepared, you’re not surprised by anything. If you do that and have good relationships, there’s no door that won’t open for you,” King emphasizes. “Keep working hard to present yourself and your skill set, and people will notice your work.”

Exchange Place 53 State Street Boston, MA 02109-2835 @NixonPeabodyLLP

Nixon Peabody LLP:

“Masai-Maliek is an ideal client partner smart, thoughtful, and business-focused. He is a strategic thinker for complex issues and is a great resource to talk through and efficiently resolve legal challenges.”

—John Ruskusky, Partner

Born

Lawyer to Be a

With a team of seven, Kevin Larner handles AIG’s property, specialty, and sex abuse litigation

BY Frank DiMaria

KEVIN LARNER HAS A LAW PEDIGREE. His grandfather founded the New Jersey law firm Budd Larner, which enjoyed eighty-five years of success before shuttering in 2019. “My grandfather was a litigator back in the day when being a litigator meant being a trial lawyer in court all the time,” Larner says.

His father and uncle both joined Budd Larner after graduating law school, going on to become partners and staying for nearly fifty years. “I was from a family where law and the concept of being a lawyer was considered esteemed,”

Larner says. The family’s dinner conversations would inevitably drift to law, with his father and grandfather using a phrase that stuck in Larner’s mind.

“They would refer to lawyers as ‘counselors at law.’ Their job was to counsel clients and to be business partners with their clients. I always found that to be interesting that they’d use that term, which we don’t hear that much anymore,” Larner says.

He earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from Amherst College. Despite his family’s law legacy, he took

NAME

KEVIN LARNER

a job with accounting giant PwC and spent two years in PwC’s accounting and auditing group.

“I learned a ton, but over time I realized it wasn’t where I was meant to be,” Larner says. After working briefly for one of his PwC clients, Larner earned a JD from Rutgers Law. “Looking back, I probably knew when I graduated college that I wanted to go to law school, but I wasn’t ready,” says Larner, now associate general counsel of litigation at AIG.

Originally hired in 2016 to handle AIG’s commercial litigation and bankruptcy litigation, Larner saw a considerable broadening of his duties when he was tapped to litigate insurance coverage matters. He describes his transition from bankruptcy law to insurance coverage law as a “sink or swim” situation. It was a challenge getting up to speed on this new

TITLE

ASSOCIATE GENERAL COUNSEL OF LITIGATION

COMPANY

area of litigation, he remembers, especially with respect to advising his new business clients on issues he previously hadn’t encountered.

Before signing on with AIG, Larner worked at Riker Danzig for eleven years. It was there that he was introduced to bankruptcy law as a summer associate, an area of the law that requires malleability. “You have to be able to adapt your practice to whatever industry or focus of the company that’s in bankruptcy,” Larner says.

At AIG, Larner manages a team of seven that handles commercial litigation, property litigation, and specialty coverage litigation, as well as all of AIG’s sex abuse coverage litigation. The most prominent of these cases is one that made national news involving the Boy Scouts of America, an organization with

a history of sexual abuse against children, Larner says.

“They filed for bankruptcy a few years ago and for the past several years, that has been my biggest case,” Larner says. The case involves both bankruptcy and insurance coverage, two areas of law Larner is well-equipped to litigate.

“I have been able to utilize my bankruptcy background and bring it into the insurance coverage fold and blend those two together to guide management and the company through what has been a very complicated case,” he says.

Another group of cases Larner and his team have been litigating involves AIG’s insurance coverage of aircrafts. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Western governments issued sanctions against Russia, which prompted the Russian government to issue sanctions

“You have to be able to adapt your practice to whatever industry or focus of the company that’s in bankruptcy.”

of their own, causing disruptions to the aircraft leasing industry. The sanctions required Western aircraft lessors to terminate their leases with Russian airlines, which required the Russian airlines to return those planes to the lessors. However, Russian regulations forbid such an act.

“Western lessors couldn’t get the planes back, and this [issue] has given rise to several multibillion-dollar disputes in the US and abroad where the lessors have filed claims for the value of all of the planes in Russia,” Larner explains. “These are fascinating cases. Aviation insurers have never seen claims of this scope and complexity, and these cases will be breaking new legal ground over the next twelve months in courts in the US and Europe.”

Since coming to AIG, Larner has been willing to take on challenges, whether that means expanding his role or tackling more complex legal matters. He recommends that young lawyers do the same. Lawyers who embrace new chal-

lenges and the risks that come with those challenges demonstrate to their peers and to management that they are both valuable members of the team and can be entrusted with challenging assignments, interesting cases, and more responsibility, Larner says.

“Kevin’s passion for the work is equaled only by his exceptional judgment and strategic creativity,” Richard Doren, partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, says. “Kevin tirelessly probes the facts and law to assure that the best arguments are always put forward on behalf of the company. It is a consistent pleasure, both professionally and personally, to work with him.”

And when Larner is not litigating for AIG, he volunteers as the president of Ridge Baseball Club, a nonprofit youth baseball organization in his hometown. “It’s something I learned from my grandfather and my father,” Larner notes. “With the privilege [of] practicing law comes a responsibility to volunteer and give back to my community.”

A Living Tribute to Those Who Came Before

BY <Yost, Billy>

Jan Fink Call reflects on a career and life made possible by mentors and driven by service

IF YOU ASK JAN FINK CALL ABOUT HER values, she talks about the minister and teacher who raised their family to think of others before themselves. If you ask Call about her professional career, she talks about the mentors who provided guidance and counsel for an eager pupil. And if you ask Call about her success, she’ll talk about her husband who made a career transition to social work and her children who are pursuing lives in public service in their own studies and early careers.

Any question asked of Call about herself is usually answered through the works and service of others, and in so doing, she reflects the values of both her parents, in-laws, and those she is determined to live up to.

The head of global litigation at DSM-Firmenich has spent the last nineand-a-half years and three promotions perfecting the in-house service she came to later than most in her career. Call has a clear passion for litigation she spent over twenty years working in private practice after she earned her JD from the University of Kansas School of Law.

“I was one of those strange people who knew they wanted to be a lawyer since the third grade,” Call says, laughing. “I grew up in a time where women were really starting to make strides, and my father, in particular, told me that I could have any kind of career that I wanted. Law as a ‘man’s job’ didn’t even occur to me, and I credit so much of that to my dad.”

Call says early mentors for her in private practice offered real-time education in litigation. She remembers sitting in a deposition and getting passed a note from a colleague letting her know that the phrasing of an attorney’s question would benefit from some rewriting with

NAME

JAN FINK CALL

TITLE HEAD OF GLOBAL LITIGATION

Rutger van Sleeuwen

an explanation of why. From her time in school to her career to early motherhood, Call says she always felt supported.

Private practice often gets a bad rap for the hardships it can cause families, but Call says she was able to stay in the firm life for so long precisely because she worked with people who appreciated her time management and commitment to both her family and her work.

“My colleagues knew I was going to get the work done and done well,” Call says. “And they also knew that I took my role as a mother very seriously. I remember one of my female partners talked with me a lot about the challenges of working with a family; she said she learned that depending on what age your kids are, you find yourself just exchanging one set of issues with another. You’re juggling a lot.”

Mentorship would play a critical role when Call decided to make the leap in-house. The role turned out to be an absolute nightmare. Within six months of her hiring, an inopportune merger essentially tanked the entire company, and an executive was brought in not to work through bankruptcy or restructuring, but to wind down the business entirely.

“This was the kind of experience I’m glad I [had] but would never want to go through again,” the lawyer says.

“It was advocated that I stay onboard until the very end because of my negotiating experience.”

A small group helped take things to the finish line, all while Call’s CEO repeatedly encouraged her job hunting and said he understood if she found her next opportunity and needed to leave.

“But this whole time, I was getting this amazing education and learning so much about areas I had never worked in before,” Call recalls. “For such a bad business experience, it was an incredible learning experience where I got incredible mentorship from our CEO.”

Fortunately, the last nearly ten years at Firmenich have been much calmer. But as evidenced by her repeated promotions, Call is much more than a skilled litigator. Her generalist skills continue to accrue, and the lawyer now acts as a mentor for others in numerous ways.

“Jan Call has a rare combination of tremendous litigation skills, natural leadership gifts, and the compassion to mentor and elevate everyone around her,” says Jonathan Segal, partner at Duane Morris LLP. “It’s a real privilege for me and Duane Morris to work with Jan and her excellent team at Firmenich.”

Call has participated in a crossdivisional mentorship program that connected her with a younger colleague out of her department; her most recent

Celebrating Jan Fink Call

of DSMFirmenich

Faegre Drinker applauds the accomplishments and leadership of our friend and colleague Jan Fink Call. It’s an honor to call DSMFirmenich a client.

partner was a food technologist. The lawyer may not understand the first thing about the day-today work of a food tech, but she does know how to support someone early in their career.

“We can talk about what she wants from her career and how she wants to develop,” Call explains. “I encouraged her to apply for a development program we have, and she was chosen for it. I’m lucky to work for a company that is focused on helping its younger people learn and grow.”

Then there’s the mentorship and service outside of work. Call became a first contact for a woman in her community who died after adopting and raising six children from the foster care system. Because the woman passed without a will, Call got involved to help connect the family with an estate lawyer and make the best of a difficult situation.

Call also acts as a scholarship reader for her college sorority and is an advisor to the St. Joseph’s University chapter. She says her day job doesn’t often connect her with people in their late teens and early twenties, and this work has helped convince her that the future is in good hands.

That view is best exemplified by Call’s own children. Her daughter is developing programming for seniors with Alzheimer’s or related memory issues. Her son wants to work in public affairs addressing healthcare inequities in the US. In all things, the Call family has adopted the values of their forebears, the ones who put service before self. A better tribute to their family would be hard to find.

Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath LLP:

“Jan is a consummate professional—decisive and practical. She is a leader who solves tough problems insightfully and efficiently.  We very much appreciate working with Jan, especially for her humor and grace under pressure.”

—Bonnie Allyn Barnett and Judith M. Praitis, Partners

Van Dalen Brower, LLC:

“Jan’s extraordinary interpersonal skills, demonstrated leadership, legal acumen, ability to see the big picture, and ability to plan and set priorities make her a model for mentoring attorneys internally and externally to succeed in their careers.”

—Ellen Radow Sadat, Of Counsel

Rebecca Letourneaux approaches her legal practice at William Blair with the perfect combination of passion and poise

By Natalie Kochanov

Steady Rock as a

Courtesy of William Blair

NAME

REBECCA LETOURNEAUX

TITLE

ASSOCIATE

GENERAL COUNSEL

COMPANY

WILLIAM BLAIR

REBECCA LETOURNEAUX DISCOVERED her passion for the law long before she became an attorney.

“I’ve always known that I wanted to be a lawyer,” Letourneaux states. “The first time I recall saying it out loud, I was in elementary school.”

As far as she has come since then, Letourneaux has never wavered from following her passion. Today, as associate general counsel at financial services firm William Blair, she puts that passion to use advising the business on litigation, employment law, and data privacy matters. She prides herself on her ability to stay calm and serve as a voice of reason, no matter what comes her way.

Letourneaux honed her knack for steadying the ship during her years as a litigator. “A big part of my role as an external counsel was to take the emotion out of things for my client,” she explains. “It came very naturally to me when I was in private practice because I was one step removed. Since going in-house, it’s become a bit more difficult. I am the client now, and my internal client is my employer.”

Despite the challenges that accompany her increased proximity to the business, Letourneaux couldn’t be more confident in her decision to take her career in-house. “I view my career

as a relationship that I need to nurture and give a certain amount of priority,” she says. “I had kids before I became a lawyer, and I had to work to set aside appropriate amounts of time and prioritize various parts of my life. I realized that my career was just a natural part of that divvying up of my time and that an in-house career would make the most sense for me.”

Letourneaux’s first in-house opportunity, at Fresenius Kabi, was a seamless extension of her private practice experience in the pharmaceutical and medical device space. Surprisingly, the role also laid the groundwork for her subsequent move to William Blair. While at Fresenius Kabi, she developed specializations in employment law and data privacy to complement her litigation skill set—and William Blair happened to be looking for someone with exactly those three areas of expertise.

“The move to William Blair was definitely not something I had anticipated. At the time, I had been in the pharmaceutical industry for fifteen-plus years, and I assumed that I would stay in that world for my entire career,” Letourneaux admits. “I didn’t have financial services experience, but I was coming from a highly regulated industry, and I knew that I could transition some of those skills.”

WHAT IS THE PROUDEST MOMENT OF YOUR CAREER?

“I would say that it was early in my career when my client chose me to first chair a breach of contract trial for them. I was three years out of law school and was working very closely with my client on some breach of contract matters, so when it was clear that the trial would move forward, they asked me to first chair it. I went on to handle several trials after that as well. I learned so much through that experience that helped frame the attorney I am today.”

Letourneaux officially joined William Blair in April 2022. “It’s such a dynamic place to work,” she says of the firm. “I’m still learning the industry, so there has been a lot of new information, but that academic component—getting to learn all of the regulations as well as different business lines, contexts, and networking opportunities—has been really exciting for me.”

Change of industry aside, Letourneaux has settled into her role as a point person for the firm when it comes to data privacy. “The evolution of data privacy regulations and data privacy perception in the US is becoming much more visible. People are realizing that they do have options to secure their personal data,” she says. That evolution, along with William Blair’s expanding international footprint, factors into her day-to-day approach to privacy. “One of the projects that I’m hoping to continue working on is better framing out our privacy programs to push the value that we provide in our

data security and our protection of our client data,” she adds.

Just like in her previous roles, Letourneaux strives to act as a stabilizing force at William Blair. “In moments of crisis or uncertainty or unfamiliarity, I want to be the type of leader who is a rock— someone people can look at and feel comfort,” she says. “I always remind myself that I have to bring calm to the situation and help my internal client take the temperature down.”

Rob Lang, partner at Thompson Coburn LLP, emphasizes Letourneaux’s ability to think on her feet and lead with ease. “Rebecca simplifies complex disputes and resolves them practically and efficiently. Working with Rebecca is a true collaboration as she is an active in-house counsel, and her work ethic is second to none. She has overcome numerous challenges to ascend to her current position, and she is not done.”

Mentorship is another crucial tenet of Letourneaux’s leadership style. She

makes a point of encouraging her direct reports to come to her with questions, whether about their current roles or long-term career goals. “I love seeing the hunger and the energy that young attorneys have and helping them harness that and develop into the type of lawyers they want to be,” she says.

Letourneaux’s own passion for her work remains high, thanks in no small part to her careful tending of the relationship that is her career. “It’s very important to me that my clients know that what I provide to them is my best effort—that when they give me something to do, I’m going to put my best foot forward with it,” she says. “I really enjoy the work that I do, and I really enjoy nurturing this relationship.”

McGuireWoods LLP:

“Rebecca is one of the best attorneys with whom I have worked. She finds sophisticated, creative, and business-focused solutions for complex legal challenges.”

—Amy B. Manning, Chair and Partner, Antitrust Practice Group

Unapologetically Herself

Scholastica Baker has found her ideal match in McDonald’s Corporation, where she can stay true to who she is while taking her career to the next level

BY Natalie Kochanov

DESPITE HER INTEREST IN THE LAW, Scholastica Baker didn’t immediately apply to law school after graduating from college. Instead, she spent the next decade in the Minnesota Army National Guard, where she gained experience as a paralegal and a military intelligence officer.

“I didn’t think that I was smart enough to get into law school,” says Baker, who received a Meritorious Service Medal during her time in the Army. “When I started my civilian paralegal certificate, each of my professors told me separately that I should go to law school. I could be a twenty-year lawyer now instead of a ten-year lawyer if I hadn’t made the mistake of not believing in myself.”

Baker ended up not just getting accepted into law school but graduating with honors and with a job offer in hand. In the process, she learned the importance of facing her

fears. That lesson emboldened her in 2022 to accept her current role as senior counsel and director in the commercial litigation group at McDonald’s Corporation. To join the fast-food industry icon, she had to relocate to a different state with her husband and their three sons—an incredible challenge that proved to be well worth the effort.

The daughter of two Ugandan immigrants, Baker spent most of her childhood in Minnesota. “Throughout my entire education, I was always, for lack of a better term, the token Black person,” she says. “I grew up in a predominantly white neighborhood, so during the week, I’d be at school with people who didn’t look like me. That experience shaped who I am today— why I am unapologetically me and why I raise my kids the way that I do.”

It helps that Baker has a strong partner in her husband, who she met in the Army and married almost nineteen years ago. “I literally married my best friend,” she says. “We communicate all the time, and we teach our boys how to advocate for themselves, how to be honest, and how to live with integrity.”

Baker recognized those same values in McDonald’s when she first interacted with the corporation while at Minnesotabased law firm Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath. Still, she didn’t want to make the decision to accept her current role lightly, so she tapped a few of her career sponsors for advice.

“A mentor, to me, is somebody in your area of specialty who can make sure that you get the opportunities you need to develop yourself in that individual craft,” she explains. “A career sponsor is somebody—not necessarily even in your area— who has truly arrived. Sponsors are the people who lay out the red carpet, pave paths, break glass ceilings, dismantle myths, and provide a space for you to excel with intention.”

Baker strives to be that person for others, and she has no shortage of tips to share. “Building your personal brand starts the first day of law school,” she offers. “You need to become emotionally intelligent and self-aware, and you need to know who you are. In my case, I am a proud first-generation Ugandan American with locs down to my back and a nose ring in my left nostril. I bring who I am and how I look everywhere I go, and I know that McDonald’s hired me for my brain and not for the length or texture of my hair, the jewelry that I wear, or anything else.”

Baker also advocates for taking the time to develop a personal organization and prioritization system. That practice has been crucial to her successful navigation of the myriad lawsuits, claims, and business issues that she handles as one of seven commercial litigation attorneys at McDonald’s.

“The biggest challenge in my role is figuring out how to get everything done,” she says. “It’s understanding not only the law

NAME SCHOLASTICA BAKER

TITLE SENIOR COUNSEL AND

DIRECTOR

OF COMMERCIAL LITIGATION

“The biggest challenge in my role is figuring out how to get everything done. It’s understanding not only the law but also the company itself, which means getting to know people, reading the intranet resources that are available along with the quarterly and annual filings, and learning the corporate-speak so that I can be a better business partner.”

Barnes & Thornburg celebrates Scholastica N.S. Baker, Esq., Senior Counsel & Director, Commercial Litigation at McDonald’s.

Scholastica is a strategy-driven leader focused on positivity and excellence. Throughout her career she has uplifted others with compassionate guidance and an unwavering dedication to integrity and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.

Nelson Mullins congratulates Scholastica Baker on her award from the McDonald’s Corporation legal team celebrating her commitment to advancing inclusion and equity in the legal profession.

but also the company itself, which means getting to know people, reading the intranet resources that are available along with the quarterly and annual filings, and learning the corporate-speak so that I can be a better business partner.”

To grow her business acumen even further, Baker is currently pursuing her MBA. She hopes that the degree will complement her legal expertise and make her a strong candidate for advancement within McDonald’s and for board service externally. As she moves closer to achieving those two ambitions, she savors every minute that she gets to spend in her current role at a company where she can envision herself remaining for many years to come.

“I am so excited, humbled, pleased, and blessed to work for such a wonderful corporation that is successful financially—and that is successful because it has excellent leadership and an excellent innovative vision,” Baker says. “My career goal is one day to become a C-suite member of a multibilliondollar corporation, and I would love for that corporation to be McDonald’s.”

Barnes & Thornburg LLP:

“Scholastica is an inspirational leader who motivates and empowers her teammates to achieve greatness. Her visionary approach and commitment to excellence set a standard to which others aspire. By focusing on collaboration and diversity, Scholastica creates a culture of success and innovation.”

—Michael C. Zogby, Partner and Cochair of Trial & Global Disputes

Lead

Portraits of today’s top legal executives, the remarkable careers they have cultivated, and the management strategies and best practices they employ to succeed both individually and collaboratively

A Lawyer Looking to the Future

David Oskandy on his vision for technology-driven legal enablement of business beyond borders and beyond deals

By Will Grant

David Oskandy

Deputy General Counsel International, M&A, and Strategic Initiatives

CDW

John Reilly

FROM AN EARLY SUCCESSFUL CAREER in music to writing speeches for a US senator, David Oskandy’s broad experience and multiple skill sets prepared him well for the technological disruption that CDW helps its customers to navigate with full-stack technology prowess. His agility in leading people, solving problems, and building initiatives across wide-ranging disciplines launched an in-house legal career that spans an array of legal areas and industries at such high-profile players as Arthur Andersen, Honeywell, Wrigley, and Avanade—the joint venture of Microsoft and Accenture. At Avanade, he received the Transatlantic General Counsel of the Year award from the 2019 Transatlantic Legal Awards committee.

The current deputy general counsel for international, M&A, and strategic initiatives at CDW has served as an advisor to his executive coworkers, spotting future opportunities and building them into innovative, market-leading approaches. He leaned into robotic automation and AI in the legal sector years before the movement caught hold. Drawing on the shape of his own career trajectory, he stresses the need for lawyers to embrace change, and he spawns reinvention for continuous improvement using design-led thinking and the latest technology platforms to enable instant collaboration across a variety of dimensions.

Oskandy embodies his philosophy, stating, “Continuous growth is fundamental to a fulfilling career, and that mindset is very important to attracting, retaining, and growing the kind of dynamic talent that enables business growth.”

A Reputation for Innovation While Emphasizing Humanity Driving tech innovation in the legal sphere while also prioritizing human communication are not inherently contradictory aspirations; however, it does take a special mindset, technical mastery, and a deep understanding of the human element to effectively navigate both simultaneously. Yet, amidst this intricate balance, he maneuvers through both realms with finesse and foresight, integrating cutting-edge technological solutions while fostering open dialogue and meaningful engagement. With this unique perspective, he’s been driving global M&A and creating revenue growth everywhere the attorney has landed.

At Avanade, Oskandy helped reposition the company by creating new capabilities and offerings, an evolution that increased revenue three-fold. He built the global M&A function at Arthur Andersen and would later help Wrigley reach its $5 billion growth objective.

Since assuming his present role in 2021, Oskandy harnesses the power of

the legal team to build initiatives across departments, cultures, and geographies to develop new opportunities for CDW. He initiated a comprehensive transformation within the international legal team, reshaping its reporting line, vision, mission, principles, methodology, and matrix.

This strategic overhaul laid the groundwork for a cohesive and agile approach to navigating the complexities of international law with precision and effectiveness. Further, he spearheaded the implementation of AI technology and offshore resources for M&A due diligence, boosting deal efficiency and speed while empowering transformative M&A strategies. Moreover, he fostered a dynamic organizational culture characterized by a relentless pursuit of creativity, continuous learning, and problem-solving, instilling a sense of value and empowerment for pioneering approaches and inspiring the team to challenge itself to continuously evolve at pace with emerging technologies.

“David is the kind of legal executive that every business would love to have, with a keen focus on identifying, mitigating, and managing risks, while effectively driving incremental business value,” says Kristofer Swanson, vice president and forensic services practice leader at Charles River Associates. “He is particularly skilled at navigating the knotty

Expertise Spotlight

CRA’s Forensic Services Practice helps companies and their counsel independently respond to allegations of fraud, cybercrime, misconduct, and noncompliance, often in moments of crisis. These allegations span a broad range of matters, such as accounting irregularities, money laundering, cyber-crime, False Claims Act violations, ABAC/FCPA, #MeToo, healthcare fraud and abuse, Ponzi schemes, and trade secret thefts.

The Practice is particularly sought out to assist with complex investigations, requiring deep industry knowledge and multiple technical competencies, and the experience to navigate thorny jurisdictional and ethical issues, comply with challenging reporting and disclosure obligations, and testify on both liability and damages. From a geographic perspective, its assignments have extended to Asia, Africa, Europe, Australia, the Middle East, North America, and South America.

The Practice has been recognized by the National Law Journal for being one of the top three Forensic Accounting Providers in America, and by Global Investigations Review as one of the leading investigative consultancies from around the world for handling sophisticated cross-border, governmentdriven, and internal investigations.

Operating from ten countries around the world, CRA’s clients over the past two years included 97 percent of the AmLaw 100 law firms and 81 percent of the Fortune 100 companies.

jurisdictional and ethical issues associated with doing business internationally. And somehow, he also finds the time to give back concurrently to the community in meaningful and substantive ways.”

The Art of Being Future Ready

The key in driving technological innovation for decades, Oskandy explains, is redefining what it means to be a lawyer. “A successful twenty-first century lawyer must be forward-looking and agile, reshaping the legal function to be a value generator while working across borders in multicultural teams to enable business objectives. They excel at crafting innovative solutions, and value collaborative input to inform their decisions,” Oskandy says. “This is the kind of future-ready profile we must maintain if we want to continue to push the boundaries of what is possible.”

Oskandy brings his growth mindset to his work in the public sphere and in the corporate world, serving as a role model for future leaders. He serves on the Development Committee for JA Worldwide, whose aim is to build organizational, entrepreneurial, and financial literacy skills for youth. He also serves on Northwestern’s Alumni Admission Council; has served as a member of the board of trustees and a gala host committee member for the University of Chicago’s Court Theatre; and has been a guest lecturer for the University of Chicago’s Law School.

His work all comes back to the lawyer’s desire to continue growing. The musician, speech writer, and world-class global legal leader with one eye always on the future clearly values the opportunities he has had in complex international organizations that have led him to CDW. He splits time between Chicago and Mexico City with his bicultural, bilingual family and says that the exhilaration of leading people, solving problems, and building initiatives across geographic, cultural, and professional boundaries continues to inspire his legal career.

Sirisha Gummaregula, COO of QuisLex Inc., emphasizes how Oskandy’s pursuit for innovation inspires others. “David is a remarkable combination of razor-sharp intellect with great humility and compassion,” she says. “He’s superb lawyer with superior analytical skills who knows intuitively where his teams need to get to and helps them get there! He’s an inspiring leader with a strong understanding and love for technology, innovation, and change.”

If you walk away with one lesson from Oskandy, it could be to pursue M&A perfection or it could be the importance of learning the complexities of driving technological innovation from the legal chair with a global mindset. But more broadly, it’s that change can be an incredible experience as well as an opportunity for growth and transformation. Seek it out and embrace what comes next.

Helping companies and their counsel seek truth and reaffirm their commitment to integrity

CRA’s Forensic Services practice supports companies’ commitment to integrity by assisting them and their counsel in independently responding to allegations of fraud, waste, abuse, misconduct, and non-compliance. We deliver deeper insights more quickly as a result of our commitment to deploying cross-trained teams of experienced forensic professionals. Our Practice – including our state-of-the art digital forensics, eDiscovery, and cyber incident response lab – has been certified under International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 27001:2013 requirements as part of our industry-leading commitment to our clients and their information security. CRA has worked with 97% of Am Law 100 law firms and 81% of Fortune 100 companies.

Awards and recognition

The Practice has been recognized by the National Law Journal for being one of the top-three Forensic Accounting Providers in America. Global Investigations Review ranked us one of the top-10 investigative consultancies from around the world for handling sophisticated cross-border, government-driven, and internal investigations. Chambers ranked us for our deep litigation support, crisis, and risk management competencies. Learn more at crai.com.

Kristofer Swanson, CPA/CFF, CAMS, CFE

+1-312-619-3313, kswanson@crai.com

Who’s Who Legal: Global Leader | Thought Leader | Expert Investigations Forensic Accountant | Digital Forensic Investigations Expert

Eli Corbett Is On A Mission For Economic Justice

Elizabeth Corbett’s career path is one driven by a powerful sense of empathy, and today, she’s on a mission to save Americans from credit card debt as the VP and Deputy General Counsel at Affirm

By Claire Redden

WHEN ASKED WHAT THEY WANT TO be when they grow up, most kids answer with astronaut or the president, but Ohio native Elizabeth (Eli) Corbett always knew she wanted to be a lawyer. “I crafted a sentence on the wide-spaced paper that we used in the first grade saying that I wanted to be a lawyer and an ice skater on the weekends,” she says.

After completing a prestigious opportunity to serve as a paralegal in the Department of Justice’s Outstanding Scholars Program as a fresh graduate, Corbett attended UCLA Law with the goal of becoming a prosecutor, and after a short time in private practice she was offered a position to serve an assistant US attorney in the District of Columbia. Corbett’s star rose as she worked at a relentless pace to

“I came to realize that you don’t have to be in the government to make big changes—you can do it in the private sector too if you’re working for a truly mission-oriented company.”

try thirty cases in two-and-a-half years, but she was also forced to come to grips with the sobering reality of America’s criminal justice system.

“I longed to do work that could fix the root cause of the problem, including offering fair financial services to underserved communities trapped in a cycle of poverty and crime,” Corbett says. Understanding the link between poverty and crime was the aha moment in Corbett’s career, and ultimately led her to join the newly formed Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).

Moved by the mission of the agency to expand opportunity to underserved communities and protect consumers, over the course of five-and-a-half years Corbett would help build out the agency,

Elizabeth (Eli) Corbett VP, Deputy General Counsel, Product, Regulatory & Privacy Affirm

“One of the cool things about being a product counsel is that you’re part of the innovation team. You’re there from day one because it’s incredibly important that we create products that are good for American consumers but also compliant with the very complicated regulatory landscape that we're a part of.”

and eventually become acting chief of staff. Her time at the CFPB taught her that she was most at home in a mission-driven organization, but she also knew that she didn’t have to be in government to have an impact.

“A lot of my friends were going to work in the Biden administration. I thought I was going to head back into government,” says Corbett. “I came to realize that you don't have to be in the government to make big changes—you can do it in the private sector too if you’re working for a truly mission-oriented company.”

Today, as the vice president and deputy general counsel at Affirm, Corbett continues to fight for economic justice by advancing Affirm’s mission to build honest financial products that improve lives at scale.

Affirm allows consumers to split their purchases up into a schedule of easy payments that fit into their budget. Affirm underwrites each transaction individually, and consumers know exactly how much they owe up front before they decide to transact. Unlike a credit card, Affirm never charges consumers late fees, and there is no ability to revolve or compound interest by design.

“The thing that makes it so amazing is that Affirm unlocked this business model that is far healthier from a financial perspective for consumers. This is something the big banks haven’t figured out to do to date,” Corbett says. “One of the cool things about being a product counsel is that you’re part of the innovation team. You're there from day one because it's incredibly important that

we create products that are good for American consumers but also compliant with the very complicated regulatory landscape that we're a part of.”

In becoming a leader who makes legal decisions at the forefront of consumer finance and technology, Corbett credits her resilience to thrive in intense environments and empathy to understand the invisible challenges people face because she was diagnosed with epilepsy at twelve years old. “I owe all of my success to my epilepsy, quite honestly. From a young age, I felt I had this thing within me that I needed to prove to others I could overcome,” Corbett explains. “It drove me to excel in academics and work extra, extra hard.”

Corbett kept her condition confidential for many years, even when she was on heavy medications through-

out law school. “Looking back, I still ask myself how I made it through under those conditions. But, somehow, I did,” she reflects.

“I think it was this overwhelming need I felt to prove that there was a seat at the table for me and that I was worthy of the opportunities that came my way.”

Today, Corbett is proud to serve on the board of the Epilepsy Foundation, where she works to raise awareness about epilepsy, reduce the stigma associated with it, and, most importantly, raise money to further research that has been significantly underfunded for far too long.

“It took me a long time to appreciate my epilepsy, but I've come to think of it as my superpower,” says Corbett. “It has created an overwhelming sense of empathy within everything I do, and I believe that's what drives my mission orientation, the way that I lawyer, and the companies that I work for.”

Akerman:

“Eli combines her senior-level government experience with an in-depth understanding of fintech to successfully guide her team through an increasingly complex regulatory environment. She is a consummate leader.” —Eric Goldberg, Partner, Consumer Financial Services, Data and Technology (CFS+)

is proud to support Elizabeth (Eli) Corbett and the cutting-edge counsel and service she delivers for Affirm, Inc. With acuity, judgment, intellect, and empathy, Eli exemplifies the best of our profession and the financial services industry.

Skanska Finds New Ways to Improve Sustainability & Diversity

Skanska continues to innovate 137 years into its existence as it dedicates more initiatives to being environmentally and socially conscious

By Will Grant

IN 1887, RUDOLF FREDRIK BERG FOUNDED what would become Skanska, the small fishing village of Malmö in southern Sweden. Berg’s idea remains intact 137 years later—but on a massive scale.

The multinational construction and development company is one of the largest in the world, with massive builds to its credit that include the renovation of the United Nations Headquarters, the World Trade Center Transportation Hub project, and MetLife Stadium.

Skanska has long been an innovator in sustainable building, completing the first LEED-certified airport terminal for Delta Airlines at Logan International Airport in Boston in 2005. One year later, the company completed the world’s first LEED Gold-certified hospital for Providence Newberg Medical Center in Portland, Oregon.

The company also walked the walk. Its 2009 New York Headquarters became the first LEED Platinum-certified office in the Empire State Building. Additionally, Skanska has committed to the Paris Agreement (a legally binding treaty on climate change) since 2017 and was cited two years in a row on Fortune ’s Change the World list, citing companies pursuing socially or environmentally sustainable practices and initiatives.

Most recently, Skanska announced the expansion of its zero-emission electric equipment while working to extend a Los Angeles subway

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Thank you for your partnership. From your friends at CDE.

line. The Hamm HD 12e VV is a battery-powered compact roller designed for use on inner-city jobsites where noise and emissions pose risks for residents and workers alike.

“The HAMM HD 12e VV pilot serves as an important stepping stone in the evolution of lower-emission construction practices while aligning with Skanska’s commitment to a more sustainable future,” Mason Ford, director of sustainability and equipment services for Skanska USA Civil, told Equipment World .

Skanska has also made an effort to diversify the organization, especially when it comes to bringing more women to the construction industry. In 2019, the company launched tailor-made PPE for women. Skanska is a mainstay on lists like Forbes ’ Best Employers for Diversity and World’s Top FemaleFriendly Companies.

Skanska has underlined goals to continue this outreach to women by promoting more women and seeking to advance organizational understanding of its United Nations Sustainable Development Group goals of achieving gender equality and empowering women and girls.

The company has an ideal role model in Lisa Mingoia, corporate counsel at Skanska USA building. Mingoia is the current president of the Washington, DC, chapter of Women in Construction.

“I’m proud to share that Skanska is committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion and continues to be a Gold Sponsor of the annual conference,” the senior counsel announced on LinkedIn, highlighting a sold-out leadership and networking conference. The outpouring of support for the lawyer’s commitment to women in construction speaks volumes for a woman helping to make the world of construction a more welcoming place to people of all backgrounds and experiences.

Construction Discovery Experts:

“Lisa is that amazing combination of a compassionate leader and a force of nature. Her dedication to her colleagues, and more specifically, supporting and lifting up women in her industry is truly incredible.”

—Lauren Abeyta, COO

A Firm Foundation

IPSY went from startup to success faster than anyone had anticipated. Anna Brannan is part of the small-but-mighty legal team helping the large subscription box company reach its fans around the country and beyond.

By Zach Baliva

ANNA CLAVERIA BRANNAN JOINED

IPSY’s legal team as the company’s second in-house lawyer in 2016. Then, the Bay Area-native with experience at Symantec and VeriSign worked alongside her general counsel to manage the growing company’s IP portfolio and negotiate agreements with the company’s growing beauty brand partnerships and influencer talent pool. She also provided legal advice and counsel to the marketing, events, social media, talent, engineering, and infosec teams.

Prior to her joining IPSY, Brannan had expertise in international trademark and copyright portfolios while acting as the lead attorney for both enterprise and consumer marketing and advertising. IPSY presented her the opportunity to have greater oversight and use her strengths as a product and commercial counsel, allowing her to pave her own career path.

With an environment that emphasized innovation and inclusivity, IPSY had a near blank slate for the legal team,

giving Brannan a platform to build up company policies, procedures, and operations from the ground up. She garnered her experience in previous in-house positions to establish a foundation and received encouragement from her general counsel to do so.

For Brannan, coming to the latestage startup from a company with thirty thousand employees and a law department of two hundred at its height was a welcome change. “Working in-house at a smaller, more intimate

“We know that beauty doesn’t have a specific look. We wanted to take it beyond glossy magazines and runway models to make it obtainable.”

Anna Claveria Brannan VP & Deputy General Counsel IPSY

company with a familiar product gives lawyers the chance to have a more direct impact,” she says. Brannan took advantage of the chance to work with talented visionary creators looking to improve and develop the technology behind a fast-growing subscription service.

“It’s like building your dream house from the ground up,” Brannan says of the process. “You add in all the features you’ve always wanted, but even when it’s complete, you realize you missed a few things. You can still add those features in, but at least you have a good foundation to work from.”

IPSY led in engineering and technical capabilities, and the company had strong marketing and user experience teams; it just needed the framework and processes required for a maturing organization. The internal legal team was brought in at the right stage to assist with legal and compliance matters from the inside out rather than just rely on outside counsel who did not have the in-depth knowledge of the internal needs of the company, Brannan says. “It was exciting, but it was also like the Wild West,” Brannan recalls. “People were moving quickly and signing contracts, regardless of authority, to get things going. This is not uncommon in young companies, but IPSY was at the stage where we needed to button things up.”

Brannan worked to determine how to grow compliance and regulatory functions. First, she established consistency by developing a formal contract review process complete with rules and

Elisa Cicinelli

limits regarding who is authorized to sign certain documents. Then, she implemented a compliance program, including a company-wide privacy and data security policy. Brannan launched an intellectual property filing strategy, a patent incentive program and started distributing quarterly IP reports. Soon, IPSY had the proper legal infrastructure to support its growth.

With these items firmly in place, IPSY was able to support the growth of its Glam Bag subscription service to millions of subscribers nationwide. As the company grew its numbers of subscribers and employees, its legal department remained relatively small. The team had to be strategic about operating with a limited head count and a tight budget while maintaining the integrity of the legal support the company needed.

In 2020, IPSY acquired BoxyCharm. The move was important and somewhat surprising—BoxyCharm helped IPSY reach several key goals. It brought notoriety to its full-size product offering, it gave the California company a second home on the East Coast, and it helped IPSY onboard new employees. Now, millions of subscribers have access to both the sample-size Glam Bag or the full-size BoxyCharm by IPSY subscription.

Earlier this year, Brannan became vice president and deputy general counsel. Studying hightech IP law under the Silicon Valley

lawyers at Santa Clara University prepared her well for life atop IPSY’s five-person legal team. “We are a tech-driven beauty subscription service, and it’s critical for lawyers here to understand both our product mix and our tech capabilities,” she says. Data is part of what sets IPSY apart as the company personalizes beauty by using member quizzes, algorithms, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to send customers products they’re more likely to use and enjoy.

The name IPSY is taken from the Latin word ipse, which means “self,” and an early company motto was “express your unique beauty.” The original vision of IPSY’s founders involved democratizing beauty and building a community where each member is empowered to express their own individuality and unique personal beauty.

IPSY has addressed inclusivity with campaigns like Discover Yourself and continues to amplify and support Black-owned, Latinx, Asian, and LGBTQ+ founded brands through Beauty Amplified. These factors are part of what keeps Brannan at the popular company. “We know that beauty doesn’t have a specific look. We wanted to take it beyond glossy magazines and runway models to make it more obtainable,” she says. Brannan and her teams continue to bring beauty to the everyday person.

Our attorneys are knowledgeable, engaged, and strategic in partnering with our clients to provide them with the highest level of legal services and protection of their IP

Ready for an Encore

Employment attorney Aleka Jones is helping to guide Cox Media Group into the future of broadcasting

By Zach Baliva

ALEKA JONES SAW COX MEDIA GROUP (CMG) as the perfect place to leverage her eclectic skills. She attended Purdue to earn a degree in accounting before attending the Indiana University Maurer School of Law for her JD. Prior to joining the media conglomerate, Jones worked for several Big Four accounting firms, a top law practice, and a publicly traded company.

Jones didn’t have much time to enjoy onboarding and get to know her new colleagues when she joined CMG in February 2020 as assistant general counsel, employment, labor, and compliance. Within just a few short weeks, Jones would be grappling with life as the only employment attorney at a major broadcasting company during the onset of a pandemic.

Instead of meeting her leaders and learning her way around CMG’s Atlanta headquarters, Jones found herself

helping her new company manage an unprecedented crisis. How did she find success in what seemed like an impossible situation? “I had to step back and remind myself to breathe,” she says. “I quickly realized that my to-do list couldn’t be set in stone. I learned to prioritize and pivot.”

The shift removed some of the pressure Jones had placed on herself and allowed the new leader to gain the confidence she needed to rise and face the challenge before her. She sought out colleagues with important legacy knowledge of the company, asked important questions about resource availability, and started formulating a plan to keep employees safe and manage a wide array of employment-related matters unrelated to COVID-19.

CMG operates fourteen TV stations in nine markets, forty-nine radio stations in ten markets, various

Aleka

Jones VP & Associate General Counsel — Employment, Labor, & Compliance

Cox

Media Group

“I quickly realized that my to-do list couldn’t be set in stone. I learned to prioritize and pivot.”

streaming and digital platforms, and related advertising businesses nationwide. In 2020, a subset of employees worked from home while others continued to work in the field reporting the news, making it important for Jones to monitor shifting local, state, and federal mandates to help guide CMG in its decision-making regarding COVID-19. Jones turned to outside counsel for help with daily functions when she needed to increase her bandwidth and while she put together a strategy to guide CMG through this challenging time. For nearly two years, Jones operated as a team of one.

While important COVID-19 initiatives took most of her time, Jones had to go beyond COVID-19 and master the ins-and-outs of her daily role. Although the media industry was new to her, she was able to rely on her previous experience in taking on new activities related to M&A due diligence and integration and policy development as well as previous stretch assignments to manage the learning curve. “I’ve had wonderful bosses and great general counsels who have allowed me to take on extra duties and assignments throughout my career as part of my own professional development,” Jones says.

In 2023, Jones was promoted to her current role as vice president and associate general counsel. She says her willingness to jump in and find creative solutions made a difference and suggests others take a similar approach. “Be ready to seize every opportunity that comes your way and don’t be afraid to operate outside of your comfort zone,” she says. “That’s where growth happens.”

Cox Media’s outside counsel, Gerald Pauling, a partner at Seyfarth Shaw LLP, says, “Aleka is the consummate professional—sharp, charismatic, extraordinarily talented, and always prepared. She always exhibits a great grasp of the pertinent legal concepts and requirements and possesses a wonderful ability to achieve business objectives within the constraints dictated by the law. She’s truly an asset to her team.”

A year into her new role, Jones is thriving. She’s collaborating with her counterparts on important initiatives, managing litigation, and advising on complex employment matters. She also continues to look for new ways to add value.

Although she is now a Georgian, Jones was born and raised in the Midwest. And while she discovered

Paul Hastings congratulates Aleka Jones of Cox Media Group on her well-deserved recognition in Modern Counsel

“Be ready to seize every opportunity that comes your way and don’t be afraid to operate outside of your comfort zone. That’s where growth happens.”

her talent for persuasion early (Jones can remember convincing a high school teacher to change a grade), she chose to pursue accounting as an initial career to build an analytical foundation, which she believes has served her well in the in-house legal roles she’s held.

Upon graduation, Jones took her first job as an assurance and business advisory auditor with Arthur Andersen before moving to Deloitte. She has also worked at KPMG, Seyfarth Shaw, and US Foods.

Jones, who credits various mentors with preparing her for success, is passionate about helping young people discover the importance of a legal education and financial literacy. She currently serves on the Business Opportunity Program (BOP) Leadership Council at Purdue University. BOP is a groundbreaking program established in 1968 to provide support to undergraduate and graduate students seeking business degrees from the Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr. School of Business, formerly the Krannert School of Management.

Along the way, Jones has focused on making herself a trusted advisor to each business. It’s something she intends to continue throughout her entire career. “We’re all works in progress so we can never stop learning and growing,” she says.

A Leader in Private Equity

Michelle Bergman reflects on the four— and now five—quarters of an incredible career in the PE space

By Billy Yost

IT’S EASY TO BE INTIMIDATED BY Michelle Bergman. She has seen private equity from every possible vantage point, including its virtual inception. She has been the general counsel when the company has been purchased by private equity (PE) and saddled with unimaginable debt. She’s watched and advised on the growth of the alternative investment industry.

Bergman’s been an outside advisor for SEC regulated private equity funds and hedge funds. She lived through the massive reimagining of the space when Dodd-Frank took effect. She’s been with clients when they’ve rung the bell on Wall Street and NASDAQ, and she has advised and negotiated deals that forever altered the PE space.

She’s seen the best and the worst that private equity has to offer. Her ultimate takeaway?

“I see the opportunity and the effort that good private equity professionals put into building good assets, building good companies, pursuing ESG and DEI, and helping growing management teams that organizations can be proud of,” the attorney says. “There is some financial engineering that gives the space a bad rap, but in my career, I’ve largely been able to self-select out of those situations. Maybe I’m lucky in that way, but it’s been a very good run so far.”

Bergman was either there or in the neighborhood when private equity didn’t have a name or identity. At one point while practicing at firm Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette (DLJ) in the early 2000s, she represented DLJ’s flagship PE fund, their venture funds and their fund advisory business, where practically any private equity deal that was being raised ran through her firm or Merrill (previously Merrill Lynch).

“If you wanted an advisor to help you raise a fund, you came to us or went across

“When they talk about earning your ten thousand hours, I think I blew through that in my first few years at my first firm, Latham & Watkins. If you’re billing eighty to one hundred hours a week, there isn’t time for much else.”

the street,” Bergman recalls. “Eventually, all of those men—and it was most certainly all men—broke up and started dozens of placement agent firms, but up until then, I did engagement letters for any major fund that you could name in the industry at the time. The work was so incredible, and the people were so great, I would have stayed at DLJ for the rest of my career had they not been purchased.”

At the risk of jumping all over Bergman’s resume, she’s effectively had four quarters of an incredible career that is still at the top of its game: a quarter in big law, a quarter in-house with companies like Duane Reade, a quarter with her own shingle out—initially on her own and then as the cofounder of Duncan Bergman Mandell Legal Services—and finally her time as the GC of Vestar Capital Partners, which started as an outsourced position but ultimately became a permanent one.

The “how” seems almost as important as the “what” in this circumstance. Bergman has what she sees as an easy answer.

“You know the expression ‘busy people get things done?’ I have never not been a super-busy person,” Bergman says. “When they talk about earning your ten thousand hours, I think I blew through that in my first few years at my first firm, Latham & Watkins. If you’re billing eighty to one hundred hours a week, there isn’t time for much else.”

Each chapter of Bergman’s resume deserves heavy study, but there is only room here for sketches of moments. Bergman was already married with two children by the time she was billing eighty hours a week.

In addition to creating her own firm that excelled in compliance expertise under new Dodd-Frank regulations, she joined former Lathan & Watkins mentor Steven Della Rocca at Vestar along with other outsourced general counsel roles along the way. She’d helm Vestar’s GC chair on an interim basis when her mentor and friend unexpectedly passed away in 2019. She was then asked to take the role full-time.

Bergman is able to maintain Duncan, Bergman, and Mandell concurrently

as a virtual firm with strong partners, long-tenured clients, and minimal staff oversight required. Her clients operate in different markets than those she supports at Vestar. It keeps her constantly busy, but it’s just how Bergman operates.

Bergman remembers the days when “private equity” was just known as “merchant banking” and a middle-market deal that would make headlines was $150 million. She remembers joking with her colleagues at Latham that maybe one day, a private equity fund would sell an investment portfolio company to another private equity fund. Eventually, it became the standard.

But there is still another chapter to Bergman’s story that she now needs to include. The proud Tulane graduate is the co-founder of the Tulane Law School Intersession for Corporate Legal Skills program, a week-long boot camp for 2Ls and 3Ls to learn skills that will allow them to immediately be effective in their first roles.

“Tulane gave me the securities regulations class that allowed me to be successful in my first job,” Bergman says.

Michelle Bergman General Counsel & Chief Compliance Officer Vestar Capital Partners

“A lot of law schools do a horrible job of teaching people how to be corporate lawyers, and I want to improve what is already a great program at Tulane.”

It’s a classic case, the lawyer says, of “be careful what you wish for.” She mapped a potential program on a napkin while at lunch with the Tulane law school dean. A year later, the dean challenged Bergman to put her money where her mouth was. The program has been so fruitful that successful graduates are coming back to teach the boot camp. Getting a job on the adjunct faculty is virtually impossible, and the program is on the cusp of expanding.

Bergman helped build the PE space. She’s represented countless movers and shakers on Wall Street. But, at present, she seems most excited about having another reason to drop by and see her son who’s currently a freshman at Tulane. The trip will keep her busy, but we already covered that.

“I

Do It Scared, Do It Proud

Kenyatta S. Beverly is creating new pathways for minority lawyers

By Billy Yost

KENYATTA S. BEVERLY EXEMPLIFIES the power of embracing fear and pushing forward, echoing the sentiment of “do it scared,” as popularized by author Ruth Soukup in her 2019 book of the same name. As labor and employment counsel for The Davey Tree Expert Company, Beverly’s journey is marked by exceptional achievements.

Previously, as labor relations counsel for the State of Illinois, she adeptly represented numerous agencies,

even though she lacked an appetite for litigation. Despite the less glamorous aspects of that job, such as driving for hours to tiny towns for arbitrations at correctional facilities, Beverly appreciates the challenges she faced along the way, all while maintaining a nearly flawless record.

As director of labor relations for Acero Charter Schools, Beverly faced off against the Chicago Teachers Union, one of the most powerful teachers’

Kenyatta S. Beverly Labor & Employment Counsel The Davey Tree Expert Company

unions in the US. This challenge intensified amid the pandemic, requiring rapid adaptation to remote learning and navigating a constantly shifting landscape of uncertainty.

Despite her nonconfrontational nature, Beverly found herself immersed in high-stakes litigation, placing her amid the most intense legal battles in Illinois.

These are the beautiful contradictions of Kenyatta Beverly. The lawyer is from East Saint Louis, Illinois, which was once named an “All-America City” by the National Civic League before it was destabilized by deindustrialization and the outsourcing of American jobs overseas. It’s the same city where jazz icon Miles Davis was raised, showcasing both its cultural richness and the stark impact of economic decline, leaving families without sustainable livelihoods.

Beverly cherishes her roots and the hard work her parents invested in their family. During her college years, tragedy struck when her brother fell victim to gun violence while home on leave from the Army. Recently, she mourned the loss of a beloved cousin to the same senseless fate, just steps away from her family’s home. These experiences tested Beverly deeply, initially making her hesitant as a young lawyer to share her background. However, she has embraced her unique journey, recognizing its value in shaping her into a compassionate attorney and philanthropist.

In third grade, Beverly glimpsed the kind of life she wanted when her class took a field trip to St. Louis University School of Law and participated in a mock trial.

“One of the law students acting as an attorney was a young Black woman,”

Beverly remembers. “I was amazed by her. To this day, I remember the image of her, her powerful presence, her confidence, and how intelligently and articulately she presented. That’s all it took for me. I did not understand all that a lawyer did at the time, but knew I wanted to be just like her.”

Being a Black woman in law and leadership is still, unfortunately, a relative rarity, and this was at the forefront of Beverly’s mind when interviewing at Davey.

“I looked at our website and social media, and I didn’t see many faces that look like mine,” Beverly says. “During my interview I was direct about my concerns. I owe an incredible amount of credit to Davey’s general counsel (GC), Erika Schoenberger. She acknowledged that in our industry, it’s an issue. But it was something she wanted to work on with me.”

Shortly thereafter, fully supported by leadership, Davey formed its Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion committee to make Davey more inclusive and a great place to work and advance for all employees. Beverly says she would quickly sense any insincerity, but the changes she’s seen have been genuine and remarkable, including the formation of multiple employee affinity groups for underrepresented groups.

“My GC empowers me with authority to select our external legal counsel, and I leverage this privilege to ensure our law firms foster substantive opportunities for minority attorneys,” Beverly says. “These discussions are imperative, and it’s clear where my expectations lie.”

This isn’t the first moment in her career that Beverly has gone to bat for minority attorneys, and it won’t

“My GC empowers me with authority to select our external legal counsel, and I leverage this privilege to ensure our law firms foster substantive opportunities for minority attorneys.”

be the last. Beverly credits the Black Women Lawyers’ Association of Greater Chicago Inc. (BWLA), an organization she served as president of from 2020 to 2021, for fostering an environment where Black women attorneys can be themselves. BWLA provided her with invaluable support and meaningful relationships with like-minded women who have experienced the best and worst the profession has to offer.

Beverly, a 2023 fellow of the Leadership Council on Legal Diversity, and future board chair of Girls Inc. of Chicago, epitomizes the organization’s mission to inspire girls to be “strong, smart, and bold.”

With a deep commitment to representation, Beverly mentors students and professionals, leveraging her own

experiences. She holds leadership roles in multiple organizations that serve disadvantaged communities and underrepresented groups.

Beverly also enjoys caring for her many beautiful plants, each uniquely named, as well as training at her gym. Her 345-pound deadlifts reflect her physical resilience and strength, but her impressive professional journey demonstrates her tenacity no matter what challenges come her way.

Frantz Ward:

“Kenyatta’s integrity, honesty, practicality, and poise under pressure allow her to resolve issues in a proactive and creative way, often avoiding litigation. She is truly a pleasure to work with, and we appreciate her partnership.”

—Megan Bennett, Partner and Jonathan Scandling, Associate

Investing in Opportunity

An inside look at the innovative solutions finance lawyer Shirmila Ramasamy champions within the World Bank’s development agenda

By Zachary Brown

WITH GLOBAL ECONOMIC uncertainty, geopolitical tensions, and multiple crises, the world’s poorest countries are sliding further away from the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. Decades of development progress have been reversed. People are struggling with food insecurity, pandemic risks, and climate crises. Shirmila Ramasamy is working to change that trajectory.

Ramasamy is a lawyer specializing in development finance at the World Bank, the organization originally created to help reconstruct Europe

and Japan in the wake of World War II. Once the 1947 Marshall Plan took over post-war reconstruction efforts in Europe, the World Bank shifted to funding infrastructure projects around the world in sectors such as power, irrigation, and transportation. Today, the World Bank provides financing to lowand middle-income nations to build schools, supply clean drinking water, improve infrastructure, generate power, and expand healthcare access.

Ramasamy oversees the design and implementation of innovative financing mechanisms which use

market-based structured financed approaches to help the World Bank reach its development targets. “Traditional development finance can benefit from using the structures and technologies that are used in the private sector,” she says.

Ramasamy is part of the team behind the World Bank’s recent issuances of Outcome Bonds—a new financial instrument that channels private capital to projects while transferring project performance risk to capital markets investors, who are rewarded if the underlying projects are successful.

In 2022, the World Bank issued a $150 million Rhino Bond to fund wildlife conservation in two protected areas in South Africa. Earlier this year, the structure was replicated with a first-of-its-kind $100 million plastic waste reduction bond that mobilizes private capital to support two plastic collection and recycling projects in Ghana and Indonesia. A portion of the bond investors’ returns are linked to innovative plastic credits,

Shirmila Ramasamy

Senior Counsel, Development Finance

“Traditional development finance can benefit from using the structures and technologies that are used in the private sector.”

The World Bank

“In the face of change, there’s real opportunity to shape the change that is to come.”

representing the plastic waste collected and/or recycled.

Equitable access to vaccines for developing countries is another challenge Ramasamy tackles. She was one of the architects of the advance market commitment (AMC) for pneumococcal vaccines—a flexible tool that limits risks and market failures by incentivizing targeted investments to ensure vaccine availability. As the World Bank fought the global pandemic, it sent vaccines to seventy-eight countries while providing emergency support operations to another one hundred countries—deploying over $157 billion to help governments and the private sector in developing countries.

Ramasamy is also the lead lawyer for the International Development Association (IDA), the part of the World Bank that is the largest source of assistance for the world’s seventy-five poorest countries. The IDA complements the World Bank’s original lending arm, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD).

The repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic continue to reverberate in IDA countries. Further, with debt distress, fuel and food price shocks, and the need to address climate change, there is increased demand for support from multilateral development banks

like the World Bank. The World Bank’s President Ajay Banga recently called on IDA’s contributing members for “the largest of all time” replenishment of IDA’s resources to face these challenges.

What does it take to devise a strategy to support development targets in an era of increased volatility? Ramasamy says success as a finance lawyer requires one to be nimble. In her context, that means maintaining both the ability to think fast and the willingness to try something new. “In the face of change, there’s real opportunity to shape the change that is to come,” she says.

Thankfully, dealing with uncertainty is in Ramasamy’s DNA. The Malaysia-native grew up speaking multiple languages, such as Malay and Tamil, before leaving Kuala Lumpur to study in London and start her career at Linklaters, where she picked up a smattering of Mandarin along the way.

The frequent moves gave Ramasamy exposure to various people, cultures, and experiences. “I didn’t want to simply be somewhere different; I wanted to thrive in each new location. I’ve learned to import the best of everything around me while

holding true to my own identity, culture, and beliefs,” she says.

The approach keeps Ramasamy energized and ready to face whatever new challenges may arise. An anticipated $1.8 trillion a year is needed by 2030 for additional investments in climate action. The World Bank continues to deliver billions of dollars of financing annually to help its member countries address climate change, but the scale of financing required cannot be met solely by the international development finance system. Multilateral development banks must also mobilize and catalyze private capital. Others may see the scale of this challenge as an obstacle to a sustainable future—Ramasamy sees it as an opportunity.

Linklaters LLP:

“Shirmila is a rare talent, combining deep technical expertise across different financing products and formats with an ability to deconstruct the highly complex into simple substance and guide her business stakeholders to the solutions. I am in awe of her ability to get the best out of external counsel and help navigate international-level legal and political landscapes to achieve the goals of the World Bank.”

—Elaine

Keats, Partner

A Simple Strategy: Do Good Work

Susan Barrett finds that if you focus on doing good work, opportunities will follow

By Frank DiMaria

SUSAN BARRETT HAS BLAZED A unique career path. Barrett is Monte Nido & Affiliates’ first ever in-house general counsel. She attributes her success to the relationships she’s built over the years and a simple philosophy. Every young attorney’s goal, she says, should be to do good work. “Then, the work finds you. You have more leeway to choose which clients you want to be working with, and which partners you want to be working under,” Barrett says.

Never satisfied with performing menial tasks, such as diligence processes, as a young lawyer, Barrett aspired to run deals with clients and operate at a higher level— aspirations that required her to gain experience at the lower echelons. “For me, it was finding mentors in the firm and clinging on to them and learning as much as I can from them. Equally important was finding sponsors, ones who wanted to take me to client events, wanted to help me develop relationships with clients and become a trusted advisor and trust me to do things and put faith in my skills,” Barrett says.

She would say “yes” to a project, even if it meant having to work extra hours or extend herself a bit thin. To her, the experience was worth it.

That plan paid off. When Monte Nido was searching for a general counsel, they reached out to Barrett directly. “It wouldn’t have happened that way if I didn’t spend all the time building a reputation and becoming a trusted advisor as a young attorney,” Barrett says.

Being the only lawyer at Monte Nido, which delivers clinically comprehensive, research-backed treatment to adults and adolescents with eating disorders, the breadth of Barrett’s duties is wide and varied. “I deal with any aspect of the business . . . I’m touching it all. I’m part of the conversation,” Barrett says.

She loves having a seat at the table with other trusted members of the executive team, being involved in broad company decisions. “Even if it’s not directly legal related, I’m still able to help the company manage risk because I’m listening and I can call things out that others may not think of,” Barrett says.

Prior to arriving at Monte Nido in 2022, Barrett worked in mergers and acquisitions with a focus on the private equity space and specifically on healthcare acquisitions and transactions.

Those experiences allowed for a seamless transition to Monte Nido. “If you’ve never seen healthcare regulatory work ever, you’d have a really hard time at a healthcare company because there are so many issues. It’s a really complex area and highly regulated,” Barrett says.

Her work in mergers and acquisitions demanded that her team perform due diligence on every deal and she acted as a project manager, while being exposed to every aspect of the target business when assessing legal compliance. “You’re advising on how to mitigate risk for anything from employment to IP to real estate to benefits

Susan Barrett General Counsel

Monte Nido & Affiliates

to data privacy to environmental, whatever it’s going to be. It’s up to you to find the very best way to advise your client on how to mitigate that risk and clean it up going forward once the company is bought,” Barrett says.

Typically, when a woman becomes a trusted member in the C-suite, she is the only woman at the table. Not so at Monte Nido, which is led by a female CEO and a primarily female executive team. Even Barrett’s twelve-member quality and compliance team is all women, all of whom bring their unique skills.

Given the common challenges that women face, her team members have formed a common bond and a unique sense of understanding. Her leadership style is collaborative with her team, and they all have the common goal to create a culture of compliance in which all levels of employees are comfortable reaching out. On her own team, Barrett’s team members have become so comfortable with her that team members reporting multiple levels down offered Barrett parenting advice at the virtual baby shower they planned for her. “That’s the kind of culture I wanted to foster on my team. In that

moment I can say to myself, ‘We did it.’” Barrett says.

When Barrett is not helping Monte Nido manage risk, she’s cultivating the next generation of lawyers as an adjunct professor. “I’ve had so many fantastic mentors throughout the years to help me get to where I am. So, I’m able to pay that forward, even if it’s just two hours on Monday nights for twelve weeks,” Barrett says.

Whether offering advice as a professor or as a mentor at work, Barrett’s advice stems from her personal philosophy. “Do good work and identify over

time those people who have skills you admire. Make yourself indispensable to them,” Barrett advises. “If you have a goal of being a general counsel, I’m a good example that it’s not something out of reach,” Barrett says.

McGuireWoods:

“Susan is a passionate advocate for Monte Nido, and her tenacity to ensure the best possible outcome is unparalleled. She is able to deliver immense value through a combination of legal expertise and business acumen. McGuireWoods is thrilled to see this most-deserved recognition for Susan.” —Holly Buckley, Healthcare Department Chair

Pivot

Showcasing prominent in-house attorneys who capably adapt to changes in their companies, industries, and personal and professional lives to carve out new paths through imagination and reinvention change in their

The Great Third Act of George Stephanopoulos Is Yet to Come

George Stephanopoulos contemplates his next move after decades in media and entertainment

By Billy Yost

George Stephanopoulos

Former VP & Associate GC

Media

Vox

THE ONLY PROBLEM GEORGE

Stephanopoulos faces in the third chapter of his professional career is finding work that can remotely compare with the causal experiences he’s had from a storied career in media and entertainment. His legal work ranges from Casper the Friendly Ghost (1995) to the Oscar-winning narrative short film Two Distant Strangers (2020). In his so-called spare time, Stephanopoulos also produced a documentary short on Bronx artists and five narrative feature films, including 2016’s love letter to Greece, Swing Away.

Before delving into what may lie ahead, the legal and entertainment career of Stephanopoulos is as varied and complex as the films he has brought to life. The lawyer was known for his iconic ventures, bringing one of Saturday Night Live’s most famous recurring sketches, “Bill Swerski’s Superfans,” to the marketplace for merchandisers in the nineties; although, it did require a complex three-way negotiation with the National Football League and National Basketball Association, who believed they had claim to “Da Bears” and “Da Bulls.”

Stephanopoulos earned his stripes at Broadway Video Entertainment, the Lorne Michaels-founded production and distribution company that launched SNL spinoff movies like Wayne’s World (1992) and other powerhouses like hit TV series Late Night with Conan O’Brien , Kids in the Hall , and comedy film Tommy Boy (1995). Fun fact: if you ever bought a Best of

SNL video to rewatch your favorite sketches, Broadway Video was always in the opening credits.

“It was my first job out of law school, and it was entry level, so it never occurred to me how cool of a job it seemed like to other lawyers in the industry,” Stephanopoulos remembers. “I worked seven days a week for the first two years because we were understaffed and a relatively small company, but that allowed me to learn the many different areas of the business. In looking back, I probably should’ve gone to more of those infamous SNL cast parties, but I was more concerned about doing the work and doing the best job possible.”

While it may seem like Stephanopoulos was bouncing all over the entertainment space for the first chunk of his career (other stops included Golden Books Family Entertainment, Discovery Communications, and Classic Media), that’s not the case in the least. The companies he worked for simply kept getting purchased and sold, and they wanted to hang on to Stephanopoulos as an innovative leader.

At one point in his early career, the lawyer helped negotiate buyouts of entertainment libraries he had helped acquire in a previous role. To make himself indispensable, Stephanopoulos read every contract of every deal that predated him, establishing himself as the resident expert on the prior exploitation and underlying rights associated with the historic properties.

While it’s common to see old properties made into new shiny Hollywood

products over the last twenty years, Stephanopoulos was on the frontlines (and decades ahead) of acquiring and rehabilitating franchise characters from the likes of Underdog, Lassie, and The Lone Ranger. Plus, he helped make VeggieTales a household institution in homes across America.

But it’s not just legacy media properties that dot the attorney’s CV. Stephanopoulos spent that last six years working for the digital media publishers NowThis, the Dodo, Thrillist, Seeker, and PopSugar (part of Group Nine Media), as well as Vox Media Studios, the TV/ film division of Vox Media that acquired Group Nine Media in February 2022. The lawyer’s relentless curiosity (and, frankly, almost compulsory need to deep dive into new areas of law and business) has made him highly effective in leadership roles with the convergence of digital and traditional media.

But the question is, what is next for a lawyer and leader who still feels he has so much to do?

Stephanopoulos’ interests and creative pursuits remain at the intersection of law and film. He has considered teaching a course on the subject, while continuing his longstanding role with the Hellenic Film Society that promotes Greek filmmakers and Greek cinema, bridging the American gap to the historic country.

He also recently joined the advisory board of the All Rise film festival, hosted by Cleveland State University School of Film and Media Arts and in partnership with CSU College of

Law. Stephanopoulos will be a guest speaker and curator at the 2024 festival this fall to discuss his work on projects, focusing on wrongful convictions, gun violence, true crime, and other social impact programming.

It’s also important to note that Stephanopoulos essentially put his legal career on hold in pursuit of making a film that took ten years to make it to the big screen. While trying to get his 2016 film Away made, he produced four other films that would help him ultimately get his dream project complet ed—a film that is semi-autobiographical in nature, combining the lawyer’s love of sports, Greek heri tage, and religious family upbringing.

Stephanopoulos is also no stranger to “develop ment hell,” or the months, years, and decades that it can take for a film to come to life. He recalls buying The Lone Ranger rights out of bankruptcy in 1991. It had already been in turnaround at three studios and wouldn’t ultimately get made until Disney brought it to the screen in 2013. Whatever is next for Stephanopoulos, he’d rather not let it take Lone Ranger time.

“My plan is to continue to make movies and practice law,” Stephanopoulos says. “To do both is a powerful combination, but the tricky part is figuring out how to do it on your own terms in order to create the career you desire.”

Like any great movie, Stephanopoulos isn’t sure where his professional third act will land, but he will make it memorable.

“In the end, what I value most is not just what I’ve accomplished for myself, but to see other lawyers and students I’ve mentored early in their careers to have gone on to achieve incredibly distinguished careers in senior leadership at iconic companies with great reputations,” he says.

Del Shaw Moonves Tanaka Finkelstein Lezcano Bobb & Dang: “George is a phenomenal attorney with a deep-rooted understanding of the entertainment industry, always able to find the right balance of protecting Vox Media’s legal interests while simultaneously never losing sight of its creative and journalistic needs and pursuits, which is critical but never an easy task.”

—Ethan Cohan and Julie Gurian, Partners

Del Shaw congratulates

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS

Sanil Padiyedathu Leads by Example

As associate general counsel of M&A and strategic transactions at Verizon, Sanil Padiyedathu sets himself apart through organization and hard work in a rapidly changing environment

By Noah Johnson

Sanil Padiyedathu Associate General Counsel, M&A and Strategic Transactions Verizon

SANIL PADIYEDATHU HAS ENJOYED over a decade in the legal profession as a corporate law, M&A, and strategic transaction expert, but his career could’ve easily gone another way.

As an undergrad, Padiyedathu contemplated pursuing a post-graduate degree in medicine or law. Growing up, with most of his family and friends in healthcare, medicine was a familiar path. But there was something about the corporate world and the legal profession that had always fascinated him. “Growing up, I didn’t know anyone who practiced in the legal field, but it was something that always interested me,” he says.

After graduating from undergrad with a finance degree, Padiyedathu began working at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) in New York City where he developed a passion for business and the thrill of complex corporate projects. That early work experience prompted him to ditch the MCAT for the LSAT.

It’s one of the best decisions he made, he says.

After leaving PwC, Padiyedathu received his law degree from Boston University and began working at Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP where he developed a diverse transactional and corporate counseling practice with a focus on mergers and acquisitions, divestitures, advising clients on general corporate matters, and other strategic considerations.

Padiyedathu continued to develop his expertise in-house at Goldman Sachs and Citibank before ultimately landing at Verizon. In each of these roles, Padiyedathu had the opportunity to work on very complex and sophisticated transactions and to help his clients navigate through regulatory, economic, and other internal and external pressures. He learned the importance of being organized, working hard, and being open to new challenges.

“No matter how long you do this job, there’s always something new to learn, and you’re constantly being challenged,” he says. “While there are

some similarities from deal to deal, no two transactions are the same. There’s always issues that come up in one deal that you may not have seen in another, and there’s always new things you’re being exposed to. It’s a very fastpaced environment, and while that can make it stressful at times, it also keeps it exciting.

“When you’re working on complex deals that have a lot of different workstreams, you have to be very intentional and deliberate,” he continues. “You have to constantly be planning a few moves ahead and anticipate issues that may arise. And then you just have to roll

“No matter how long you do this job, there’s always something new to learn, and you’re constantly being challenged.”

up your sleeves and get the work done. Sometime there’s a lot to do in a short amount of time, and there’s no substitute for just putting the time in.”

As the son of hardworking immigrants who brought Padiyedathu to the US when he was two years old, the leader is no stranger to working hard, taking on difficult tasks, and exploring new frontiers. Those traits explain why he joined Verizon in 2017.

“I was in a really great place, working with an amazing team of lawyers and clients at Citibank, but it was a tough time to be an M&A lawyer at a big US bank. At that time, with the regulatory constraints, regulators wanted banks to be smaller, and there wasn’t a whole lot of acquisitions happening. And when I learned about the opportunity at Verizon, it seemed like a great fit. Verizon was at the forefront of 5G during a transformative time in telecom, the tech industry, and our economy,” says Padiyedathu, who currently serves as associate general counsel of strategic transactions. “It was, and continues to be, a very exciting time to be in telecom.”

Since he joined, Padiyedathu has been instrumental in a wide range of transactions, including the sales of Verizon Media to Apollo, HuffPost to BuzzFeed, and Tumblr to Automatic. He has also been involved in the acquisitions of ProtectWise, Vidder, BlueJeans, and Bluegrass Cellular, as well as the venture capital investments and ongoing governance in Verizon Ventures’s portfolio companies, the acquisitions of, sales of, and swaps of spectrum licenses.

Carlo Zenkner, partner at Kirkland & Ellis, who has worked alongside Padiyedathu, says, “Sanil’s ability to lead successful outcomes in complex

transactions comes from his ability to be on top of the detail while simultaneously analyzing the deal with a highlevel strategic lens. There are very few lawyers who bring these complementary skills to the table, and it makes Sanil a superb deal lawyer.”

As a leader, Padiyedathu also believes in the importance of teamwork and leading by example. It’s a value he learned playing sports as a child and continues to practice as the parent of three kids.

“I’ve always been active and loved playing sports. From little league baseball as a child to playing Division I lacrosse in college, I’ve learned the importance of being part of a team and working together and filling in the gaps to get a job done,” he says. Those lessons and skills have directly translated to his approach at work as an in-house lawyer.

And Padiyedathu continues to develop his skills outside the office as a father of three young children. “My kids have taught me so much that applies to different situations at work. As I teach them about the need to make good choices, to understand consequences, and to be patient, I’m reminded to practice that in my own life,” he says. “They constantly help me to be a better version of myself and, in turn, a better lawyer.”

When Padiyedathu isn’t parsing through complex transactions, he’s focused on giving back to his community through pro bono and volunteering efforts. He participates in legal clinics which offer legal assistance to small businesses, helps introduce high school students to careers in law, and coaches his children’s soccer and baseball teams. He is also a volunteer with Meals on Wheels in his community and is on the board of trustees of his local library.

Protecting Innovation at Analog Devices Inc.

Joseph D’Angelo embeds himself with semiconductor leader ADI’s engineers and business managers to advance the company’s goals to be a cutting-edge business

By Zach Baliva

JOSEPH D’ANGELO WENT TO TOUR Italy looking for adventure and found a new career instead.

The Case Western graduate started his professional career as a software engineer, but somewhere between Rome and Florence he had a conversation with a newly minted patent attorney, who piqued his interest in IP protection. As they talked over espresso and tiramisu, D’Angelo’s friend told him all about being surrounded by inventors and immersed in innovation.

After the trip, D’Angelo went back to his job programming systems and writing software models—but for several years he found his mind going back to that conversation in Italy. “One of the neatest things in the world is to be constantly introduced to new innovation,” he says. D’Angelo was convinced that would happen in the world of intellectual property, and he enrolled at the Franklin Pierce School of Law.

Originally, D’Angelo assumed he’d head to a big law firm as a patent associate, but a summer job opened his eyes to other possibilities. He worked as a patent clerk at EMC Corporation and saw how the data storage and management company’s in-house legal team made a direct impact on the organization. Suddenly, the young law student had a new goal: he wanted to embed in a cutting-edge business, master its technology, and learn how to use the law to protect innovation and drive positive outcomes.

It didn’t take long for D’Angelo to realize that he and EMC were a perfect pair. There was just one problem— EMC preferred seasoned generalists to rookie subject-matter experts. As luck would have it, just before graduating law school, EMC had a change of heart. EMC realized that D’Angelo could save the company’s external spend by completing high volumes of patent prosecution work. In return, EMC would teach him everything else about being a lawyer and hire him as a full-time employee.

He held up his end of the bargain and benefited as EMC led him through rotations in trademarks, inbound licensing, transactional areas, and more. “EMC developed my career by continually advancing me as an attorney,” D’Angelo explains. “They took me

from a raw graduate and transformed me into an experienced and wellrounded attorney.” D’Angelo did such a good job proving the business case that he became the model for EMC hiring other fresh law students.

By 2015, D’Angelo was managing EMC’s Advanced Software Division’s intellectual property as a senior legal director. When Dell bought EMC in a record tech deal worth $67 billion, he stayed on to assist during integration and beyond.

After nearly ten years, D’Angelo was ready for a new challenge. He joined Acacia Communications as its head of intellectual property and established the company’s internal IP function. When tech giant Cisco acquired Acacia Communications, D’Angelo continued to support the Acacia business unit as well as provide legal support for Cisco’s other optical business units.

In 2023, D’Angelo joined Analog Devices Inc. (ADI) to handle all of the semiconductor company’s IP litigation.

Joseph D’Angelo Head of IP Litigation Analog Devices Inc.

“My engineering background gives me a language I need when I talk to the business managers and engineers about our technology.”

Acacia Communications, D’Angelo’s prior company, sold to Cisco for $4.5 billion; as of March 2024, ADI’s market capitalization was approximately $95 billion. That means D’Angelo gets to manage a greater depth and breadth of disputes. He also has the chance to grow beyond IP litigation and take on contractual disputes, non-employment litigation, and transactional IP work.

D’Angelo and his team must do all they can to ensure ADI can compete and monetize its innovations without putting its technology and trade secrets into the hands of its competitors. His hybrid experience helps. “My engineering background gives me a language I need when I talk to the business managers and engineers about our technology,” he says. “I can really drill down on the tech and understand the key differentiators that we need to protect to help the company win on innovation.”

ADI combines analog, digital, and software technologies into solutions that help drive advancements in digitized factories, mobility, and

digital healthcare to combat climate change and reliably connect humans and the world. For example, biometric smartwear company Prevayl turned to ADI for its clinical-grade sensing technology and expertise in converting real-world phenomena into insights that help transform lives. ADI’s engineers provided the advanced electrocardiogram technology, temperature sensor, and advanced power management integrated circuits. D’Angelo and other internal lawyers protect the inventions that bring companies like Prevayl to ADI.

Several key moves have put ADI in a position of opportunity for ongoing success. In 2021, the company acquired semiconductor company Maxim Integrated for $20.8 billion to further strengthens ADI’s position as a high-performance analog semiconductor company. The demand for digital devices—which are powered by ADI’s products—is promising. The future is bright for ADI, and D’Angelo is committed to protecting the technology as the company continues to grow.

The Capacity for Anything

As Jaime Heins contemplates his next professional chapter, he will leverage a career spent building out valuable experience

By Billy Yost

JAIME HEINS’ VERSATILITY WILL SERVE him well no matter where he goes from here. It’s not every day that one gets to talk to general counsel at an inflection point of their career, but the former general counsel and corporate secretary at EBlock is ready for whatever the future may hold. And Heins’ resume showcases just how resilient, innovative, and versatile the attorney and business leader can be.

“I’ve always prided myself on the versatility that’s ingrained in me,” Heins says from his home in Burlington, Vermont. Including helping a private company grow, enabling a business to become a public company, and applying the skills he learned while in private practice, Heins’ range of capabilities helps him know just how important it is to keep business moving forward.

Heins’ career has exemplified a relentless drive to continue to build out the attorney’s wide and generalist in-house skill set. At Burton Snowboards, Heins was only the second lawyer hired to expand the function and capabilities for the world-renowned winter sports brand’s law department.

From there, he moved to public company Keurig Green Mountain, which

Jaimesen Heins Former General Counsel & Corporate Secretary EBlock

several years later merged with Dr Pepper in a transformational massive merger between the two companies to create a beverage behemoth with an almost fifty-person law department. Heins led the US commercial and litigation teams as vice president and associate general counsel for the combined Keurig Dr Pepper enterprise.

From that VP and AGC role, Heins challenged himself again as the first in-house lawyer hired by EBlock to establish and define the function entirely for the newly public company. The attorney has worked through multiple industries—from snowboards to beverages and automotive technology—to truly define what it means to be an effective generalist and business partner.

Wherever Heins decides to go next, the GC says his deep commitment to

public service will remain part of his life. For Heins, his best work comes at the local community level where one’s political party is more of an afterthought than the desire to unite residents of the Vermont community around a more common mission.

“I’ve had the opportunity to serve on local legislative bodies, and the work is just about being a good citizen and a good neighbor,” Heins says. “You use the skills from your everyday professional and personal experiences to build relationships and overcome hurdles in the community and help expand the pie for everyone.”

Heins has served on governmental bodies and nonprofit boards, and much of it comes back to the greater Burlington area, the community that holds the lawyer’s heart. Heins has a great deal of affinity for his local YMCA where

he’s served as a board member for several years. He considers the Greater Burlington YMCA a community resource full of programmatic offerings that can provide meaningful experiences regardless of one’s economic situation.

“Enabling that kind of mission is very rewarding to me, and I hope I’ve been able to provide some level of input and value to the broader organization,” Heins says. “It’s very fulfilling to me to be able to have some kind of impact on a community that’s done so much for me.”

But the biggest question remains: What’s next for a lawyer who seems willing to entertain everything from leading another public company to returning to private practice? Much like his public service work, Heins says it comes down to the organization’s mission.

His latest role involved helping EBlock navigate a challenging and distressed automotive industry and macroeconomic environment the past two years. The GC got more involved in securities regulation, corporate governance, and partnering with the board of directors. Now equipped with those new muscles, Heins says he’s willing to entertain almost any offer if it meets a slim set of criteria.

“In the right department and in the right culture, I’m open to almost any conversation,” the attorney says. “I just want to be in a role beyond the everyday lawyering. I’m at the point in my career where I’d like to be spending my time with an organization where purpose matters and where I can drive change. That’s what is compelling to me at this moment, and I’m not entirely sure if that means a public company, a private company, or even returning to private practice.”

That broad availability might seem overwhelming to many. The further some get along in their careers, the more specialized they become. It’s not a criticism or knock but a natural progression. But Heins’ willingness to consider a move that will widen his generalist skill set just reinforces that adaptability and resiliency which have aided him over the past twenty years.

For now, Heins is enjoying some time on the slopes with his children and contemplating what the future holds. The only guarantee of his future is that what is next will be interesting.

The Opportunity She Needed

Katrina Lindsey landed her dream job as chief legal officer at Casey’s General Stores by remaining open to the unexpected

By Natalie Kochanov

FOR MOST OF HER COLLEGE CAREER, Katrina Lindsey didn’t have law school on her radar. It had taken enough convincing just to get her to finish her bachelor’s degree.

“At the end of my first year of community college, I had enough credits to get my associate’s degree, so I told my mom I was done,” says Lindsey. “My mother, who earned a dual degree in marketing and business, was probably shaking inside as I told her this. She basically made me promise that I would go back someday.”

She made good on that promise by studying communications at Florida

State University. After graduation, Lindsey was shocked to receive an offer for a full-time advertising job that would pay less than her part-time bartending gig at Chili’s, the casual restaurant chain where she had been working while attending school. One of her professors suggested that she instead apply to law school—and kept reminding her about it until she finally did.

At Stetson University, which she attended on a scholarship, Lindsey fell in love with both the man who would become her husband and the law itself. Since then, she has remained open to going down unexpected paths, includ-

ing the one that led her from Florida to Ankeny, Iowa, and to her current role as chief legal officer (CLO) at Casey’s General Stores. “If you had told me that my dream job would be working for a convenience store that is the fifth-largest pizza chain in the nation, I would have said there’s no way,” she says. “But this is literally my dream job.”

Part of what makes her latest role the perfect fit for Lindsey is that it allows her to leverage the full spectrum of her experience. Before joining Casey’s, she honed her legal skills in private practice and through varied in-house roles at Walt Disney World, Darden

Katrina Lindsey Chief Legal Officer Casey’s General Stores

Restaurants, and Office Depot—each a major player in its respective industry, not to mention a tremendous learning environment.

By the time she received a recruiter call about an opening at Casey’s, Lindsey had long known that she wanted to become a CLO. That aspiration motivated her to consider the Casey’s role, despite how distant, both figuratively and geographically, it may have seemed from her expectations for her next step. “I had lived in Florida my entire adult life. I had never lived in snow, and I had never driven in snow. I came up to Casey’s, and it literally

snowed the day I was supposed to interview,” she says with a laugh.

But Lindsey made it to her interview and soon made that snowy place—and Casey’s—her home. She then turned her attention to delving into the business and worked to cultivate strong relationships throughout the organization. “A big part of it is being interested in what other people are doing and what’s going on with them,” she says of relationship-building. “It takes me a long time to get to my office in the morning because I drop by everyone’s workstation to say good morning.”

That strategy, which she learned from a leader at Darden, gives Lindsey a chance to interact with her team members in the spaces where they feel most comfortable. As a result, she finds herself in a better position to ensure that they have the resources they need to grow and thrive as they support the business.

“COVID and the work from home trend have made it difficult for many businesses to build cohesive teams,” says Bob Tomaso, office managing partner of Husch Blackwell. “When I visited with Katrina and the rest of her in-house legal team in Iowa shortly

We

are proud to work with Katrina Lindsey

and the talented team at Casey’s General Stores. Congratulations to Katrina on her achievements and her recognition by Modern Counsel.

after her arrival, I discovered she had implemented a great way for her team to retain flexibility and yet still collaborate. It is a calendar that I have since recommended to many clients facing the same issues. Katrina asked each of her team members to come in several days each week, as determined by them, so long as at least one of those days in the office was the same day for everyone. The system seems to have worked very well.”

When it comes to the business itself, Lindsey has been able to draw on the restaurant and retail expertise that she acquired at Darden and Office Depot, respectively, but she has also discovered elements that are unique to Casey’s. “From the outside, Casey’s looks deceptively simple, but then you realize that we run a fuel business, a grocery store, and a quick-service restaurant out of the same location,” she says. “I’m in awe of our store managers because they don’t just run three businesses out of that one location; they run three businesses while keeping team members and our guests happy.”

Store-level operations are never far from Lindsey’s mind amid her day-to-day efforts overseeing legal, compliance, government relations, and food safety matters. She believes that all those happy team members and guests—many of whom hail from cities with fewer than five thousand residents—are what make Casey’s so special. “There’s a love for Casey’s that I think is more indicative of a smaller company than a Fortune 300 company,” she says.

Reflecting on her career up to this point, Lindsey herself couldn’t be happier with her decisions. As she continues her quest to leave Casey’s even better than she found it, she encourages aspiring attorneys to be bold enough to chart nontraditional courses of their own.

“Sometimes, you have to be open to the opportunity that you need, even if it doesn’t look like the opportunity that you think you want,” Lindsey emphasizes. “If I had restricted myself to going after opportunities that looked the way I wanted, I would have missed out on working for a fantastic company, with the best boss and the best peers I’ve had in my career, and with a team that is absolutely incredible.”

Trailblazing Legal Leadership

Husch Blackwell is a different kind of law firm, built on a culture of selfless service. Our attorneys collaborate nationwide to provide inventive approaches that guide clients like Casey’s General Stores through their most complex challenges.

Erin Sedloff finds a multitude of ways to empower Mainsail Partners, including each of its portfolio companies

By Will Grant

Endlessly Empowered

ERIN SEDLOFF JOINED MAINSAIL AS

associate general counsel in 2021 after having worked in private practice for almost a decade. At her last firm, Sedloff worked as outside general counsel for startups helping highgrowth technology companies successfully raise capital and build their businesses from formation through exit.

This role included advising her clients through financing rounds, M&A, cross-border flip, and other strategic transactions, while acting as a trusted advisor to navigate the wide range of legal challenges her clients faced throughout their life cycle as a startup. Sedloff served as the go-to lawyer for her clients, and if there was an issue that required input from a specialist, she acted as quarterback to source the right specialists at the right time.

Sedloff made the move to Mainsail as the firm was seeking an in-house counsel who had documented skills across a wide range of subjects and who could manage the internal legal affairs of the firm’s management company while also standing up Mainsail’s legal center of excellence.

Mainsail had previously launched other operational centers of excellence including sales, talent, marketing, engineering, and finance, all of which focused on developing a set of best practices and providing hands on support for Mainsail’s portfolio. The legal center of excellence was the next resource hub for Mainsail’s portfolio companies, and the fact that Sedloff had worked so closely with founders of high-growth tech companies meant that she was able to hit the ground running.

She developed a variety of programming and resources for executives across the portfolio on the best practices to mitigate legal risk while supporting the growth of those

An Effective Leader

Despite every wildly varied and intensive experience Erin Sedloff has had as a lawyer, what makes her so effective in her chosen profession was a result of the varied experiences she had before going to law school. Before ten years in private practice that included acting as an outside general counsel for startups, she worked in management consulting, staffed on projects reaching from southern Spain to Minneapolis. She then went on to lead active travel expeditions throughout the world, including Central America, Europe, and many stops in between. These travels included a several-hundred-mile biking trip across Alaska before she returned to California to pursue law school at UC Law San Francisco (formerly known as UC Hastings).

“I learned how to be a leader and how to navigate unknown landscapes with conviction by leading groups of executives on adventure travel trips in some of the most remote destinations in the world,” Sedloff says. “This was in a time—not so long ago—where GPS was not readily available, so we still relied on paper maps. More than once I found myself in a destination I had never been to before. I knew that if I took a wrong turn, I could end up leading the group dozens of miles in the wrong direction. I had to make decisions with limited information, a lot of conviction, and as much humor as I could muster. Most importantly, I learned quickly that the key to my success was not necessarily always being right, but in my ability to understand people and earn their trust in a very short period of time.”

companies. In addition, Sedloff acts as a trusted advisor for the firm’s numerous portfolio companies. She’s not there to replace a company’s counsel, she’s there to empower the companies to source the right specialists at the right time and maximize the value derived from legal resources by helping to think about legal in the context of the broader business strategy. Sedloff has created internal playbooks and processes to create efficiency around executing on strategic transactions both internally and across the portfolio.

Alex Allemann, shareholder and member of board of directors at Winstead PC, acclaims Sedloff’s leadership at Mainsail. “Erin is a practical and excellent technical attorney. However, what sets Erin apart is her ability to serve as an effective, trusted advisor not only to Mainsail, but also Mainsail’s portfolio company founder teams,” he highlights. “It’s clear that founders view Erin as a key component of the Mainsail value proposition.”

Among the initiatives Sedloff has undertaken has been drafting and deploying a cross-portfolio AI Acceptable Use Policy. That initiative was credited by one of Mainsail’s partners as a valuable piece of IP for the firm.

“AI is changing the way the world is expecting technology to serve them and the law surrounding the use of AI is continuing to evolve at a rapid pace. It reminds me a bit of navigating with a paper map on dirt roads,” Sedloff says. “We’re crafting policies in real time based on the information available and moving forward with conviction and, of course, as much humor as we can muster.”

Sedloff is a leader among her peers and recently spoke on a panel at the Women’s General Counsel Network

conference, where she was asked to represent the investor’s perspective on industry standards as it relates to AI.

Beyond legal, Sedloff has risen as a leader within the firm, having co-led the launch of a cross-portfolio women’s affinity group at Mainsail called EMPOWER. “EMPOWER already has more than 250 members between the portfolio and Mainsail,” Sedloff explains. “There is so much enthusiasm and excitement about fostering connections amongst female leaders across the portfolio and Mainsail. Bringing those

women together into peer mentorship pods [and] networking dinners and educational and thought-provoking webinars has highlighted the incredible sense of community Mainsail fosters across its portfolio.”

Since coming in-house, Sedloff has made an immediate impact both inside and outside the legal department. She recently won the company’s “Mission to Mars” award, a peer-selected award given to two people at Mainsail you’d most like to travel with you to the red planet. It’s not an award one typically

Expertise Spotlight

Winstead represents founders, entrepreneurs, startups, and emerging growth companies, as well as angel investors, venture capitalists, private equity funds, and other institutional investors. Our team has deep experience in focus areas including equity and venture financings, convertible debt financings, commercial transactions, consulting and professional services agreements, joint ventures and strategic partnerships, intellectual property protection, technology commercialization and licensing, privacy and cybersecurity, employment benefits and executive compensation, mergers and acquisitions, asset sales, and other exit transactions. Winstead advises clients on entity formation and capital structure, ongoing corporate governance and stakeholder issues, and tax and employment matters. Winstead’s corporate and securities/ M&A team has extensive experience representing issuers and investors in a broad range of public and private securities offerings. We also have substantial experience in preparing SEC filings (such as Form 10-K, Form 10-Q, Form 8-K, and proxy statements) for public companies, as well as providing advice and guidance on securities law compliance and initial and continued listing requirements under applicable national securities exchanges (such as Nasdaq and NYSE). Winstead regularly represents investors and corporate insiders with their SEC reporting obligations.

Erin Sedloff

Assistant General Counsel

Mainsail Partners

would think of awarding to a lawyer, but Sedloff has proven that the most effective in-house counsels are those who are able to unite companies, not divide.

“Erin is much more than any title might suggest,” says Peter Massumi, co-founder of Massumi + Consoli. “I have gotten to know Erin well since she started, and to see how she has shaped the legal function within Mainsail and its companies—she has pushed boundaries to create immense value. And this is just the beginning.”

If it isn’t already apparent, Sedloff doesn’t stay in her lane. She wants people to trust her and to succeed with her. That means working across the firm as both a business and legal resource by truly understanding the needs of the firm and each of the portfolio companies that Mainsail has partnered with.

Sedloff is effusive when she talks about her work at Mainsail.

“I have a truly incredible job: I get to work on exciting projects with highly motivated and intelligent people, who all deeply respect and care about one another.

Entering as the first in-house counsel of the [then] eighteenyear-old firm was a daunting task; however, the leadership team at Mainsail has given me freedom to build out a legal department that will continue to evolve and scale as Mainsail continues to grow,” Sedloff says. “Being affiliated with Mainsail’s brand is truly the honor of a lifetime.”

Lindette Hassan shares how her approach to problem solving has paid off in her professional and personal life

Changing ‘No’ to ‘How’

By Noah Johnson

ATTORNEYS ARE PROBLEM-SOLVERS, and each one has a different way of navigating the road to resolution. Lindette Hassan stands out among this array of legal minds. As a decades-long intellectual property (IP) expert who has worked with scientists on patents, trademark, and copyright matters, she mirrors the posture her inventor clients take toward their ideas.

Instead of focusing on what can’t be done or settling for “no” amid adversity, Hassan asks: “How?”

“When you send in a patent application and receive an office action from the patent office saying that your client’s product is similar to one that came out before it, the question always becomes, ‘How do we overcome this?’” she says. “Instead of going back to the client and

saying, ‘Well, I guess that’s it,’ I believe the mindset should be geared toward what we can get protected and how we can figure it out.”

That perspective is the foundation of her leadership as assistant general counsel of intellectual property at BASF, a global chemical company that produces chemicals, materials, industrial solutions, surface technology,

and more. In that role, she provides IP and trademark support for the company’s North American region and takes pride in the influence she has on her business colleagues.

“For the most part, when you work in-house, you are the legal decision maker for your client,” Hassan says. “At this point in my career, I’m comfortable pointing to the decision we should make based off my research and reading, and I’m able to deliver that message with confidence. Of course, no one is right 100 percent of the time, but I’m also confident enough to say how we should pivot.”

Because of her clients’ confidence in her decisions, they know they can trust her to be upfront when facing controversy. “Having that kind of confidence and trust from your client is definitely something I’m proud of,” she says.

After graduating with a biochemistry degree, Hassan started her career working at The Wistar Institute, a cancer research facility. There, she prepared research reports, summaries, protocols, and delivered research presentations. She also got a chance to meet an in-house patent attorney who made her consider a career change.

Lindette Hassan Assistant General Counsel, Intellectual Property BASF

The attorney was involved with chemistry and projects both the graduate students and professors were creating, which sparked Hassan’s interest. “I liked the idea of helping the people who were inventing things,” she says.

After several meetings with the attorney, Hassan went to law school at Temple, clerked at a US District Court, and started her legal career at Fox Rothschild as an IP associate before coming to BASF a decade later. Her work allows her to blend her passion for science and the law, she says.

“It’s been an interesting journey because my science background has allowed me to understand nomenclature and terminology that the [scientists] I support use. The law allows me to translate it into the legalese necessary to get a patent granted. I’ve enjoyed it since it’s stimulating both parts of my brain,” Hassan says.

She also enjoys it because of her nature as a problem-solver because she isn’t afraid to tackle a challenge. Truth is, she just doesn’t like being told no.

“When I hear that word, my first instinct is to find a way to turn it into yes,” she says. “That’s how I felt when I got my grade on my first chemistry test and saw that it was a B, or when I was waitlisted at certain law schools. It’s always been instilled in me to say, ‘What do I need to do to get the outcome I want?’”

“It’s always been instilled in me to say, ‘What do I need to do to get the outcome I want?’”

Hassan’s drive doesn’t go unnoticed. “Lindette is an inspiring leader to all women in law,” says Kristi Nicholes, counsel at Lowenstein Sandler. “She does not just speak about work/ life balance and overcoming personal challenges, she lives it. Her successes are apparent in her poise and thoughtfulness when collaborating with others to solve difficult problems,” Nicholes emphasizes.

That mindset held true even in the most challenging times, particularly when Hassan and her husband were trying to start a family.

“I remember finding out early on in our marriage that I was technically infertile and being really upset and disappointed by it,” she recalls. “But, with the encouragement of my husband and close friends, I remember thinking ‘What exactly does this mean and where do we go from here?’ Because of that, my husband and I were able to overcome the initial disappointment and figure out how to pivot. Now we have three sons.”

Today, Hassan is a staunch advocate of accomplishing a work/life balance and credits her husband for encouraging her to maintain it. Young attorneys who want to accomplish the same should “surround themselves with others who support the balance.”

“Since January of 2007, I’ve met with some of my law school friends for dinner once a month. Taking those two hours a month to talk with friends is refreshing,” Hassan says. “My husband and I also continue to prioritize our date nights, and we take trips together three times a year. It’s important to have people like that around you who understand the need for balance.”

Specialization as a Springboard

Beth Ryan is the lawyer to talk to about New

Mexico oil and gas at ConocoPhillips

By Billy Yost

WHEN SEEKING AN IN-HOUSE counsel position, Beth Ryan believes that while the role is a generalist’s playground, there is incredible value in digging deep.

“There are a lot of lawyers who know a little of everything, but I decided early on that I wanted to be an expert,” the senior counsel at ConocoPhillips explains. “I was a young, female lawyer working to set myself apart, and I would advise younger lawyers that learning one area extensively is an invaluable springboard to getting where you want to be.”

In Ryan’s case, that meant deep diving into oil and gas title work— reviewing ownership rights in the oil and gas space and spending hours looking into public records, codes, and the areas of law that would be applicable. The work would propel her into

transactional and regulatory work, now her specialty, but not before becoming a true subject-matter expert.

Ryan’s knowledge was so respected that New Mexico Governor Susanna Martinez appointed the lawyer to serve on the Environmental Improvement Board for the state. She was the youngest appointee by at least twenty-five years. Her role included sitting on the board responsible for rulemaking and adjudicating rules and regulations for environmental, air, and water quality issues.

After that appointment, Ryan was again selected by the governor to the New Mexico Game and Fish Commission.

“I went from environmental to wildlife management issues, which have always been a passion of mine in my personal life,” Ryan says. “In both

of these roles, I was the person behind the bench asking the questions. Now, when I appear in front of agencies, I remember what I liked to see from that side of the table.”

Ryan built out extensive firm expertise prior to going in-house and even spent five years running her own practice, a feat she managed soon after giving birth to her second daughter. But eventually, ConocoPhillips recognized the value the student of New Mexico oil and gas law could bring to the Texas-headquartered company. Those years of specialization had paid off big for her.

“Your expertise and intelligence will ultimately carry the day,” Ryan advises. “It can be tough being a female attorney in oil and gas, but if you can keep that chip off your shoulder, your work and expertise will speak louder for you than anything else. You won’t have to ask to be at the table. They’ll be coming to you.”

While moving to Texas for a senior counsel role with one of the most wellknown names in energy should have been a dream moment, Ryan was also grappling with real life. A newly single mother of two daughters, the lawyer packed up and moved her family by herself to Midland.

“It was the beginning of COVID, and I had these wonderful girls,” Ryan says. “The three of us were having to adjust to a completely new life in a completely strange environment. But I’m so grateful for it now. We were going to make our own happiness, and we did it together.”

Beth Ryan Senior Counsel, Lower 48 Regulatory ConocoPhillips

A Formidable Legal Legacy in New Mexico

Rooted deeply in New Mexico’s rich and diverse history, attorneys from Hinkle Shanor LLP have worked to protect clients’ interests in natural resources, the environment, complex civil litigation and more. The firm dates back to 1888, and it owes its staying power to its lawyers’ experience and expertise in diverse practice areas.

Whether clients need to navigate regulatory hurdles or protect and advance their interests in litigation, they rely on Hinkle Shanor LLP. A multitude of clients from the past 135 years are glad they did just that.

“It might take you some time to find the job that’s right for you and where you want to spend your career. There are steps in a journey. But be a sponge wherever you are, and, eventually, you’ll find the kind of organization that doesn’t make you dread Monday morning.”

The senior counsel knew she was in the right place when new neighbors showed up with casseroles and desserts, welcoming the new family to Texas. Ryan says after a short amount of time, Midland felt like a hometown she’d never left, and it’s made the challenge of raising two girls on her own just a little bit easier.

400 North Pennsylvania, Suite 640 Roswell, NM 88201 (575) 622-6510

218 Montezuma Santa Fe, NM 87501 (505) 982-4554

7601 Je erson St. NE, Suite 180 Albuquerque, NM 87109 (505) 858-8320

Life at ConocoPhillips has been equally rewarding. Ryan says it wasn’t until she came to the company that she knew what a decent night’s sleep on Sunday night felt like. She suddenly had a role she looked forward to, a culture she could thrive in, and a work/life balance that encouraged her to take the time she needed to be the kind of mom she wants to be.

“I’ve learned a lot of lessons through so many jobs and just

life in general, and I hope some younger attorneys can realize that you don’t have to stay in an environment that isn’t good for you,” Ryan says. “It might take you some time to find the job that’s right for you and where you want to spend your career. There are steps in a journey. But be a sponge wherever you are, and, eventually, you’ll find the kind of organization that doesn’t make you dread Monday morning.”

Ryan says she now has the best of both worlds: substantive work that rewards her intellectually and the time to devote to her fifteenand ten-year-old. The lawyer says her work speaks for itself, but her proudest moments lie in seeing the kind of young women her daughters are becoming. Those girls have quite an example to follow.

FO CUS

Modern Counsel explores the role of law in the medical field through discussions with five attorneys

Marjorie Adams | Ferring Pharmaceuticals

Robert Peters | Walgreens Boots Alliance

Tracey Van Dillen | Kenvue

Jonathan Rabin | Natera Inc.

Daphne Walker | JPS Health Network

AN WORKPLACE AUTHENTIC

By Joseph Stark

Marjorie Adams shares her career journey, her passion for improving the workplace, and her mission-driven work at Ferring Pharmaceuticals

”No matter our roles/responsibilities, all contribute to work culture, and its’ success is through the sum of workers’ strengths.”

Raised in a blue-collar town in Ohio, Marjorie Adams planned a career in international human rights after working on tough issues in Russia, China, and a Hong Kong refugee camp before entering Columbia Law School. However, before graduation, she pivoted away from global injustices to focus on needs in the US. “After the Anita Hill Hearing, I chose to focus on US problems, specifically discrimination and harassment, and to pursue a career in employment law,” she says.

After Columbia, she started her legal journey at Lowenstein Sandler, where she worked on a wide array of legal matters including employment defense cases. She dedicated her evenings to pro bono work, representing those seeking political asylum from India, Russia, and China.

From there, Adams went to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in New York and worked on systemic discrimination cases under the Americans with Disabilities Act and other anti-discrimination laws. Seeing employment litigation from the employees’ lens, she witnessed a harsh truth about the legal process.

“There was no satisfaction at the end of employment litigation. The accused company was not happy with a win; former employees weren’t happy because their lives had been disrupted. And neither had closure on failed work relationships,” Adams says. “I realized that litigation for people’s work problems is not the best solution and wondered if the accused company had a different process, better policies, or supervisor training, [that] these events might not have happened.

People spend more time at work than home, usually, so they need a place where they feel safe, respected, and can be themselves.”

Those realizations inspired her to bring her expertise in-house at global companies like ADP and Nielsen, in addition to multiple life science companies. Leading employment, ethics, and litigation, she has helped companies adopt and implement not only fair global policies for all, but also process improvement for individual terminations.

“It’s important to make sure that when people are terminated, it’s done in a respectful way—whether the person isn’t a right fit for the company or whether they’re leaving because of a layoff,” Adams says. “This signals to all employees that this is a work environment where people are valued.”

During COVID-19, “companies had to make hard, daily decisions that impacted people’s continued work and way of living,” she says, which she did as senior vice president of global employment, compliance, and ethics at Nielsen. “It was the best workplace culture, making daily rapid-fire decisions with an executive team who always wanted to do the right thing, whether rethinking executive compensation or furloughing, rather than terminating workers in fifty countries.”

After Nielsen’s sale to private equity, Adams wanted a role where she could again impact employee culture. The opportunity to work at Ferring Pharmaceuticals—a biopharmaceutical company headquartered in Switzerland that specializes in reproductive medicine, urologic oncology, and gastroenterology—was perfect. With it brought a chance to bring Adam’s mission-driven mindset to a mission-driven company.

“I always enjoyed my life sciences roles because the people that I serve each day develop, manufacture, market, and sell products that create a better quality of life, which made Ferring a natural pivot,” Adams says.

are implementing pay transparency laws. Without a federal pay transparency law, many US states have passed their own and prohibited hiring companies from inquiring about applicant salaries. Without those guardrails, BIPOC and women have struggled to get equitable pay, which Adams experienced firsthand.

“Years ago, I worked part-time to be with my young kids, so my salary was reflective of being in the office [for] fewer hours. When I needed to work full-time again, hiring companies would ask what I made and then offer that lower salary to me, regardless of my experience level or what those in comparable roles made,” she recalls.

“That’s why it’s been exciting to be part of pay transparency implementation,” she continues. “It is a subtle but important resolution for past pay inequity that has had a disproportionate impact on certain US workers. Companies now must tell applicants what they will offer for the advertised role.”

Today, Adams is head of employment and litigation and serves on various committees, including ethics and compensation.

In addition to enterprise improvement, Adams says she is focused on how US companies

Her advice to young lawyers? “Do not be afraid to change your career path,” Adams asserts. “And always ask others there about an organization’s culture, what they like about it the most, and what can be improved before you accept [an offer].”

“No matter our roles/responsibilities, all contribute to work culture, and its’ success is through the sum of workers’ strengths,” she shares.

E M B RA

Starting his legal career amid the Great Recession, Robert Peters learned early on how to master the art of embracing change as an opportunity in a rapidly changing business environment

as an Opportunity

By Joseph Stark

In the early aughts, a special investigative committee combed through WorldCom’s past accounting practices amid suspicions that the company overstated its assets. As an early career professional at PricewaterhouseCoopers, Robert Peters was one of the lucky few to assist the investigation, which went on to be one of the largest corporate accounting fraud cases in US history.

That invaluable experience opened his eyes to a wide variety of Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), business, and accounting matters and sparked his interest in pursuing a career in law.

“As part of a team that assisted the special investigative committee of the board of directors of WorldCom, I worked closely with attorneys and accountants and saw how business and law intersected,” Peters says. “It really exposed me to how dynamic and multidisciplinary a career in law can be.”

While he came out of that investigation inspired and ready for law school, the start of his legal journey was far from smooth sailing. After graduating from New York University School of Law during the 2007-08 financial crisis—one of the most severe worldwide economic crises since the Great Depression—he joined Willkie Farr & Gallagher in New York and subsequently relocated to Houston and joined Vinson & Elkins, where he advised clients across various industries on complex M&A, securities, and restructuring transactions. Through those early, challenging experiences as a young corporate transactional attorney, he learned the importance of

being adaptable and embracing change as an opportunity to grow and make an impact.

“The instability of the global markets during the early years of my career provided me a unique opportunity to learn about many different areas of the law that I never anticipated getting involved in,” he shares.

“Those experiences helped me to develop a greater understanding and appreciation for the challenges facing businesses in our rapidly evolving business environment and taught me the importance of being adaptable, comfortable with change, and to seek out opportunities in the midst of change,” Peters says.

That mindset served him well when he transitioned in-house at B/E Aerospace, where he played an integral role advising the company in its acquisition by Rockwell Collins. He then joined BP, where he provided legal support to its global treasury function during the company’s shift in strategy to reimagine energy and increase its investments in clean, reliable, and affordable energy.

In 2021, during the pandemic, Peters joined Walgreens Boots Alliance—an integrated healthcare, pharmacy and retail leader across the US, Europe, and Latin America—where he currently serves as senior counsel to the company’s global treasury function.

As the company seeks to reimagine local healthcare and well-being for all as part of its purpose, it helps to have an adaptable leader like Peters to assist in navigating unprecedented changes.

“Dealing with change is difficult, but to succeed in today’s business environment,

it is critical to develop the ability and mindset to embrace change. My ability to adapt enables me to be a trusted advisor and business partner, helping to find ways to drive the company’s business forward and deliver business results while maintaining a level of high integrity and sound risk management,” Peters says.

In addition to assisting Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA) achieve its financial and operational goals, Peters has looked to bring his leadership to the DEI space. He currently serves as a subcommittee chair of the company’s legal DEI committee, which

recently helped the legal department receive Mansfield 3.0 Certification Plus status.

The certification is awarded to legal departments that implement “a behavioral science and data-driven approach to expanding the pool of qualified talent considered for leadership that included at least 50 percent historically underrepresented individuals, such as women lawyers, racial and ethnic lawyers, LGBTQ+ lawyers, and lawyers with disabilities,” according to Diversity Lab.

The certification not only speaks to WBA’s commitment to diversity, but

ROBERT PETERS Senior Counsel, Global Treasury Walgreens

Boots Alliance

We are proud to work with Robert Peters

and the talented team at Walgreen Boots Alliance. Congratulations to Robert on his achievements and his recognition by Modern Counsel.

also to a sense of responsibility that Peters feels for achieving it, he says.

“As a junior lawyer, I saw pretty good diversity in the lower ranks at law firms, but as I advanced, the diversity of those around me waned,” he remembers.

“Despite tremendous efforts in the DEI space over the last decade, women and minorities remain well under-represented at law firms and in-house law departments, particularly in leadership positions,” Peters says.

“With the challenges presented to the current landscape of DEI, it’s been an area that I have dedicated more time and energy to ensure that the company continues to recruit the best and most qualified candidates and that we provide the appropriate level of support and encouragement to ensure that all employees have an opportunity to advance and take on leadership roles at WBA,” he says.

A huge part of that support trickles down from strong mentors. That’s why the company’s legal DEI committee provides coaching and mentor support to students at the Chicago Legal Prep Charter Academy, helping students improve their public speaking and debate skills.

Outside of that program, Peters also takes it upon himself to informally mentor young attorneys within and outside of the company. A piece of advice he offers to young attorneys is to apply the same mindset and work ethic that helped them succeed in law school to the first few years of their legal practice.

“I highly encourage young attorneys to take the opportunity to learn as much as they can about different areas of the law and set aside the time to speak to and build relationships with the attorneys and clients that you represent,” he says.

“Even if they are committed to a particular area of law, they will be better attorneys if they understand how their area of expertise fits into the bigger picture of the client’s goals and are able to adapt to any unexpected events. And, one never knows, they may find a passion in another area of law that they may have never considered before,” Peters advises.

Tracey Van Dillen speaks on her career trajectory from pharmacy technician to head of litigation and employment at the world’s largest consumer health company by revenue, Kenvue

TRACEY Van Dillen

Puts

By Joseph Stark

Tracey Van Dillen’s start in the legal field wouldn’t be quite what you would expect. At just fifteen-years-old Van Dillen began working as a pharmacy technician at a major retail pharmacy in southern New Jersey. It was here that she first discovered her passion for helping others and realized the profound impact she could have on people’s lives by pursuing a career in healthcare. Van Dillen’s mother’s example as a single parent working full-time instilled in her a resilient and rigorous work ethic and fueled her determination to succeed.

Several pharmacists who Van Dillen worked with during her high school years noticed her passion and encouraged her to consider medical school. Soon, she was on track to become a physician and started her studies at Bucknell University as a pre-med biology major. Her time filling prescriptions and dispensing medicine from an early age inspired her to take on other healthcare-related jobs during college. She worked in a hospital pharmacy making morphine drips and crash carts for the emergency room, and she also worked in a long-term rehabilitation center for a summer. She was just as adamant about her aspirations inside the classroom, excelling in her various pre-med courses and counting down the days until she could be the one writing prescriptions.

But then, she took an elective course that turned her plans upside down.

“It was an environmental law and policy course, and I loved it. To me, it was it was the best of both worlds because I could still pursue a science degree but merge it with my interests in reading and writing,” Van Dillen says. “I switched my major from biology to environmental science and decided to apply to law school and jump into the legal profession.”

She had never considered becoming a lawyer and did not know any attorneys growing up; in fact, she and her siblings were the first in their family to go to college. But despite switching gears from medical to law school, Van Dillen never lost her focus on wanting to improve the quality of others’ lives.

Van Dillen attended Seton Hall University School of Law. During her time as a law firm summer associate, she worked on both environmental and healthcare matters, and the cases involving medicine were the most interesting to her.

Over the next twenty years, Van Dillen became an expert in product liability and mass tort litigation at two private practice firms and a seasoned in-house lawyer supporting the likes of Actavis, Allergan, Johnson & Johnson, and, currently, Kenvue. Though Van Dillen has spent her career navigating various responsibilities and working with a wide array of clients and colleagues, the one thing that has not changed has been her ability to put people first, rooted in her days serving patients at the pharmacy.

Tracey Van Dillen’s Focus

“As a head of litigation, my focus is on mitigating risk, streamlining my team’s processes, and optimizing the value we provide. While those are certainly my overall goals, I want to make sure we continue to be a compliant, values-driven organization, and I take that just as seriously as managing litigation.”

TRACEY VAN DILLEN Head of Litigation and Employment Law Kenvue

“Being able to connect with people is critical to being successful. You can have all the technical capabilities and the best training, but if you can’t make personal connections with your leaders or the people you support, you won’t go far. If you don’t build those personal relationships, others might not even know about the talents you have,” she says.

Van Dillen credits the relationships she built in private practice and at J&J for opening doors for her. In January 2023, she became head of litigation and employment law for the consumer products business prior to the spin-off of the Kenvue business. As head of litigation and employment law, she oversees a global team of attorneys, investigators, and associates that manages commercial litigation, product liability, investigations, and employment matters. She also develops and implements litigation strategy globally for the company, which is the proprietor of brands such as Aveeno, BAND-AID Brand Adhesive Bandages, Johnson’s, Listerine, Neutrogena, and Tylenol.

The position has afforded her the opportunity to engage in unique and fulfilling projects. “The highlight of my career has been being part of Kenvue’s Listing Day. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Being a part of establishing a new publicly traded company doesn’t happen that often. It was even more meaningful to me because I believe in and

Barnes & Thornburg and its Product Liability & Mass Torts team is proud to work alongside Tracey Van Dillen, Head of Litigation and Employment Law at Kenvue.

Tracey is an amazing leader who inspires everyone around her to be the best they can be. We celebrate Tracey’s career and her dedication to the life sciences and consumer care industry.

Trends Van Dillen Is Keeping an Eye on in Her Industry

“I’m really interested in seeing continued developments in AI and how it can be used appropriately to increase efficiency. Additionally, we work in a highly regulated space in consumer health products, so the regulatory landscape remains top of mind.”

use our beloved brands, and I’m so proud to work at Kenvue.”

She has also had the opportunity to recruit for and build a new litigation and employment law team of talented, diverse professionals who have become more like family than colleagues in a short amount of time. She leads the team with a very collaborative and encouraging leadership style.

“Tracey is a true pleasure to partner with,” Kristen Seeger, partner at Sidley Austin LLP, says. “She combines strategic vision regarding big picture opportunities and risks with the ability to zoom in on key details of individual disputes. She is a highly effective leader, and her collaborative, proactive, and pragmatic approach produces excellent results and strong teams.”

“I think strong role models are vital in early career development. Having a personal champion to help amplify your talents and contributions is invaluable, and as leaders we should aim to pay it forward,”

Van Dillen says. “Pushing your team to strive for something greater and helping them to shine are the qualities of a strong leader. For new people leaders, being a good listener and championing professional development opportunities is a good place to start.”

Kenvue’s purpose, “realizing the extraordinary power of everyday care,” resonates with Van Dillen. Her values, instilled at a young age, have shaped the impact she wants to have both personally and in her field: empowering and advocating for others.

Barnes & Thornburg LLP:

“Tracey is an amazing strategist whose commitment to safeguarding responsible innovation and patient well-being is unparalleled. Having worked with her in different roles, I am so impressed by Tracey’s inspirational leadership, and her vision, demeanor, and wit make partnering with her so enjoyable.”

—Michael C. Zogby, Partner and Cochair of Trial & Global Disputes

SIDLEY CONGRATULATES

Tracey Van Dillen

Head of Litigation & Employment Law at Kenvue on being recognized by Modern Counsel for her impressive accomplishments.

Tracey is a remarkable lawyer — and an even better person — with whom we have been honored to work over the years. We celebrate both Tracey’s leadership and Kenvue’s innovation as they partner to deliver iconic products that improve the daily lives of people around the world.

LOOK ING

Jonathan Rabin has found his match in Natera Inc., a company with an approach as interdisciplinary and mission-driven as his own legal practice

By Natalie Kochanov

Jonathan Rabin thrives at the intersections between disciplines. By the time he applied to college, he was already envisioning a double major that would allow him to tap into his diverse interests in economics and mechanical engineering. During an event for accepted students at Bucknell University, however, it was a presentation by a professor in an entirely different field that caught his attention.

“That’s how I stumbled into environmental studies,” Rabin says of listening to the professor speak. “It was a good blend of science and policy, and it built on and related to the economics as well. A theme throughout my entire career has been finding the connections and using those connections to move forward.”

Rabin sees a parallel to his own career journey in the story of Natera Inc., an organization that has introduced a fresh perspective into the clinical genetics space by using signal processing technology to distinguish between different sources of cell-free DNA. For Rabin, who has been at Natera since 2013 and who currently serves as lead counsel for litigation and regulatory compliance, the company’s life-changing mission remains a major draw—as does the passion for that mission that guides the work of all members of the Natera team.

Before going in-house at Natera, Rabin developed a wide-ranging expertise by seeking out areas of overlap in each of his

educational and professional experiences.

“I carried my environmental studies background into NYU Law, which has a strong environmental program,” he says. “While I was at NYU, I also took an insurance law course that I found to be quite interesting. That’s what led me to Foley Hoag in Boston, as Foley is one of the few large firms that have a strong environmental insurance practice.”

Rabin continued learning on the job at Foley, where he found his perfect fit in the litigation department. He had the opportunity to explore a variety of things, including environmental and employment issues, product liability, and securities matters.

“In one of my favorite cases there, an insurance company was arguing that they shouldn’t have to pay because a product had been used in an off-label manner.

We argued that the insurance company couldn’t step in and make a regulatory determination that the FDA hadn’t,” he says. “That case was great because it combined insurance and product liability, all with an FDA aspect.”

Rabin often thinks about cases like that one—cases, in other words, that required him to use multiple skill sets—during his day-to-day dealings at Natera. He had known about the company for some time before coming on board, having connected with now-secretary and chief legal officer Daniel Rabinowitz while still at

Foley. Their relationship took a turn when Rabin came to Rabinowitz for advice about potentially joining a different startup.

“We got to talking, and he said, ‘You know, if you have some availability, I could use an extra set of hands on this project we’ve got going,’” Rabin says. “So, I started work at Natera in that capacity. My first big project here was actually a financing [project], which was not something I had done at Foley. It’s another example of trying to weave in experience and finding ways to apply whatever you’ve

done or learned in the past to the current challenge.”

From his earliest involvement with Natera, Rabin couldn’t help but notice the passion of its employees. Their passion not only sparked his own, but also made him an eager student of both the science and the personal history behind the company’s products.

“It’s hard to find someone who is more passionate about the company than Matt Rabinowitz, who was CEO when I met him and who is now executive chairman,” he says. “He had a family member who had a pregnancy

with an undiagnosed genetic condition, and he couldn’t believe that there wasn’t a better test for genetic conditions prenatally. So, he got together a team, did some groundbreaking science, and actually built one.”

The result is Panorama, a prenatal blood test that can identify chromosomal and sub-chromosomal anomalies as early as nine weeks into a pregnancy. Natera has since extended its cell-free DNA technology into other medical specialties, such as cancer and organ transplant monitoring.

“It all stems from applying Matt’s signal processing expertise to the genetics field and then applying this technology that we’ve built in women’s health to other areas where there’s a mixed signal of cell-free DNA,” says Rabin. “That’s at the core of the company—how we can take these seemingly disparate disciplines and combine them to create something that really helps people.”

As Natera and its product portfolio have expanded, Rabin has worked with Dan Rabinowitz to build out the legal team. His role has become more specialized as a result, but he maintains close contact with his colleagues in legal and beyond to ensure cohesion across the organization. He takes the same approach with outside counsel, with the bonus of getting to teach them about the great work happening at Natera.

Hope S. Foster, a member of Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo, P.C., speaks highly of Rabin and his leadership. “Jonathan’s outstanding litigation capabilities, creative problem solving, and strategic

JONATHAN RABIN Lead Counsel, Litigation & Regulatory Compliance

Jay Rabin

and honors

Lead Counsel, Litigation and Regulatory Compliance proudly supports

JONATHAN RABIN

“A

GLOBAL FORCE IN BUSINESS LITIGATION” W a S t r e e t J o u r n a

1,000+ litigators and arbitration practitioners the largest and most successful litigation and arbitration law firm in the world.

We only do one thing disputes and we are the best at it We win

“Most Feared Law Firm Globally”

Four times in the past five years, surveys of over 350 major companies conducted by independent BTI Consulting Group identified us as the firm they least wanted to face as opposing counsel

“Fearsome Foursome”

For ten years, Quinn Emanuel has been recognized by BTI Consulting as one of the “Fearsome Foursome,” an elite group of firms that “clients don’t want to see on the other side and for good reason ” The “Fearsome Foursome” stand out “for their intense approach and fierce tactics in today’s ever-evolving, complex, and changing litigation market ” The firm has been named by BTI Consulting a total of 13 years as one of the “most feared firms in litigation ”

leadership of Natera’s litigation and regulatory compliance team help the company harness the value of its pioneering DNA testing technology. Mintz is honored to partner with Jonathan on high-stakes cases and to support his pivotal role at Natera,” Foster says.

Rabin’s leadership stands out to Bruce Vanyo, partner and chair of securities litigation and enforcement at Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP.

“Jon reminds me of the captain of an old sailing ship encountering multiple storms. He remains calm and steady at the helm; makes quick and wise decisions in maneuvering the ship; and knows his ship and its limits extremely well. All the while, he is amicable to and patient with his crew,” Vanyo commends.

Rabin talks further on his collaboration with outside counsel. “When we have litigations, we take a really active role in [both] educating outside counsel about the science and the products and working with them to come up with the best arguments and theories for the case,” he says.

Whether he’s learning about new technologies or sharing his knowledge with others, Rabin hasn’t stopped finding inspiration in Natera’s mission—or the incredible people who bring that mission to life.

“There’s a strong team ethos and flow, where it’s all about how we can help each other to get done what we need to get done,” Rabin says.

“The mission that launched the company was to find new and better ways to do things that have a real impact on people’s lives,” he continues, “and the most I can hope—as an employee, as a shareholder, and as someone who has actually used Natera’s services—is for the company to continue expanding into new areas and applying our high level of scientific advancement, quality, and precision as broadly as we can.”

Strategic Litigation Counsel

Mintz is pleased to congratulate our friend and client Jonathan Rabin of Natera on his many accomplishments and well-deserved recognition in Modern Counsel.

We are proud to collaborate with Jonathan and his team, supporting their work to advance Natera’s global leadership in DNA testing innovations.

DAPHNE WALKER

Enjoys the Best of

By Noah Johnson

BOTH WORLDS at JPS Health Network

Daphne Walker has enjoyed a successful career in nursing and in the legal profession. At JPS, she’s gotten a chance to unite both passions.

DAPHNE WALKER EVP and Chief Legal Officer JPS Health Network

Not too many people can say that they’ve had two successful careers, but Daphne Walker can. Before becoming a chief legal officer (CLO) in the healthcare industry, she was a nurse for more than a decade. She not only had a chance to practice in all areas of that field, but also to make it to the pinnacle of the profession in roles including chief nursing officer, performance improvement manager, and various nurse clinical roles.

As she performed more work in hospital risk, she became more interested in law and went on to forge a legal career with a focus on healthcare matters. Today, she is executive vice president and chief legal officer at JPS Healthcare Network, which serves the healthcare needs of families in Tarrant County, the third-most populous county in Texas. It’s a role that allows Walker to have “the best of both worlds as a former practicing nurse and a legal professional,” she says.

“You don’t get all the warm and fuzzy experiences you have on the clinical side when you deal with patients and see their journey firsthand, but the skills I needed to support them at the bedside [allow] me to keep an eye toward customer service as I deliver legal advice,” Walker shares. “As we work with our internal business operators, it’s easy to piggyback off those

soft skills and to be empathetic with what they’re trying to accomplish while being the risk manager for the organization.”

As the organization’s first in-house CLO, Walker has played an instrumental role in identifying critical legal needs for JPS and building up a strong legal team with appropriate foundational processes and policies. Building a supportive legal culture has also been a focus, says Walker.

“I remind our team constantly that we have to be a partner that supports the business. We can’t quickly dismiss things that seem complicated. We have to work through it. At the same time, we have a job,” Walker says. “So, we have to balance that support with the understanding that there may be times when we have to draw a line if we can’t move forward with something. That’s a skill set. You don’t want your internal client to view you as a roadblock. They have to feel comfortable coming to you but also understand your ethical obligations to the hospital district.”

Walker has no problem demonstrating how that balance can be struck. For a servant leader like her, it starts by asking people what they need, a trait that has allowed her team members to view her as a mentor.

“It helps me understand how to focus on things that are most

“I want to make sure I’m developing my team and that I’m someone they can come to. Similarly, I strive to be the person my business partners can come to for general advice.”

important to my team, to keep them engaged, and to see [me] as a partner and a resource,” she shares. “I want to make sure I’m developing my team and that I’m someone they can come to. Similarly, I strive to be the person my business partners can come to for general advice. I lean in with my C-suite leaders to find out what is top of mind for them, making sure we’re in step and that we’re getting ahead of challenges together.”

After graduating as the first African American valedictorian from her high school, she initially planned to study business in college. But her mom, who had spent her career as a nurse, inspired her to go down the same path.

“I watched her in that career and thought it was rewarding, lucrative, and offered a work/life balance,” Walker says, who started her family while she was still in college. She received her nursing degree in 1997

“When you’re getting started, don’t just think that since you don’t know something that you should show up unprepared. Everything you put in front of someone is an opportunity for them to notice you.”

and spent the next few years working her way up the nursing management ladder at Hereford Regional Medical Center and Medical Center of Arlington. In the latter organization, she also worked as a medical surgical nurse while attending law school.

Her legal journey has been just as inspiring. She got her start at Fulbright & Jaworski (now Norton Rose Fulbright), where she became an expert on various healthcare-related operational, contractual, and transactional matters. From there she took her expertise in-house at Tenet Healthcare and United Surgical Partners International before coming to JPS.

While Walker’s clinical background gave her the skills she needed to succeed in law, so did

the guidance of several mentors. Today, she aims to help young people in a similar way. She wants them to internalize an idea a mentor once imparted to her: “There’s no such thing as a draft.”

“When you’re getting started, don’t just think that since you don’t know something that you should show up unprepared. Everything you put in front of someone is an opportunity for them to notice you,” Walker says.

Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP:

“Daphne is an extremely talented general counsel. Her legal acumen coupled with the experience that she brings from her clinical nursing background uniquely positions her to be a true strategic partner for her leadership team.”

—Kenya Woodruff, Partner and National Chair, Health Care Practice

Evaluate

A look at the logistical challenges, evolving regulations, industry shifts, and cultural concerns outside the office that lawyers must analyze and navigate to manage their impact inside the office

Averill Conn Helps Bring Renewable Energy to Texas

Averill Conn, a proud Texan, helps bring renewable projects to life

By Billy Yost

AVERILL CONN DIDN’T SET OUT TO BE an expert in the renewable energy space. Despite starting an environmental club in middle school (the wonderfully named SOAR for “Save Our Awesome Rainforest”) that sold macadamia nut cookies for the betterment of the Amazon, Conn views her expertise in renewables as an extension of her family’s long ties to the traditional energy industry.

Conn, a proud fifth-generation Texan, is the granddaughter of an oil field trucker.

Her husband is in the oil field service business, and the attorney started her career supporting the development, construction, and operation of natural gas plants in the mid-2000s. Conn sought out experience instead of a more traditional route in oil and gas because she could see where the future was heading.

“I have so many dear friends and family in oil and gas, but I think Texas can be known as so much more than that,” Conn says. “Texas was early in building wind farms out

“There is incredible solar progress happening in South Texas. We have so much wind and so much sun, and Texas is traditionally very friendly to businesses looking to build. I think Texas has a real leadership role in this space, and I’m proud to be here.”

in West Texas that have now expanded to the Gulf Coast. There is incredible solar progress happening in South Texas. We have so much wind and so much sun, and Texas is traditionally very friendly to businesses looking to build. I think Texas has a real leadership role in this space, and I’m proud to be here.”

Conn, who received the Senior Counsel of the Year (Large Legal Department) from the Texas Law Book in 2023 and was a finalist for the Texas General Counsel Forum’s Magna Stella Awards in 2014, knows that most lawyers working in the renewable energy space are either in San Francisco, New York City, or Washington DC. She doesn’t see a problem with that, but it just makes her Houston-based practice all the more important in getting the word out to the rest of the country. Texas isn’t just for drilling anymore.

Part of Conn’s interest in the space lies in the sheer novelty of the work. The attorney was instrumental in helping

install electric vehicle (EV) charging stations in the 2010s ahead of Nissan’s release of its landmark EV, the LEAF, let alone Tesla’s Model 3. In many ways, people like Conn were working to build a space that did not previously exist, and so adaptability and being willing to take some risks were difficult work requirements.

“There is an aspect of making it up as you’re going along,” Conn says. “To me, that’s fun. So much of development work is team-oriented, and so you’re interacting with engineers, financial experts, marketing, and regulatory people who are all working across their disciplines to bring this to life.”

Those are the kind of interactions that were instrumental in bringing Conn in-house in the first place. She and a former client had a long-running joke about how Conn’s job was to “translate engineer” for him to make his work more easily understandable to people outside his space. That’s work she relishes

because it ultimately unites a team and helps a project move forward.

Translating either engineering or difficult legal concepts, Conn says, is one of her superpowers. She’s always had a knack for making complex subjects easily digestible in writing, and it’s a skill that’s made her uniquely successful in-house, especially in a field that can be so full of jargon and industry-language-specific.

“I think communicating clearly and concisely and being transparent is just who I’ve always been,” the AGC says. “I try very hard to mean what I say and practice what I preach. Ultimately, we’re only as good as our reputations, and I take my role as an attorney and counselor very seriously. I’m in a service profession, and you really have to have the trust of your clients.”

Conn’s outlook on the energy space is not a winner-take-all premise. She says around 80 percent of her work supports renewal projects, but she also spends other time supporting broader businesses in the energy space, from upstream E&P to refining and “conventional” thermal power generation.

“You see so many international energy companies looking around and realizing that they’ve been in business for sixty years and want to be in business for another sixty,” Conn says. “There are transitional energy spaces, but the future is moving to truly renewable energy sources, and that’s the future we want to be part of.”

Conn’s own move to renewables was an organic one, but she’s now serving as an important advocate for Texas’s own renewable efforts. Sure, she’s built renewable energy all over the country, but the daughter of Texas understands that even in the heart of oil country, renewable energy can have a strong home base.

Defining Leadership

Vinson & Elkins is proud to recognize Averill Conn for her contributions as Associate General Counsel for Vitol. We are proud to work alongside her to craft effective, strategic legal solutions that help drive the legal profession and the industry forward.

Vinson & Elkins LLP:

“Averill is an exceptional attorney with the uncanny ability to leverage both her diverse experience and external legal counsel across a wide range of challenging and fast-paced transactions for the benefit of the client.”

—Michael Joyce, Partner

Beyond What’s on Paper

Sara Tucker was thinking about social justice issues like LGBTQ+ inclusion long before the laws were friendly. Now at Kimberly-Clark, she uses her authentic self to earn trust from consumers across the world.

By Russ Klettke

AS DEI (DIVERSITY, EQUITY, AND INCLUSION) has come under fire recently, it helps to look at the life and career of Sara Tucker to understand why fostering an inclusive workplace where employees can be their authentic selves matters.

Tucker wrote about court rulings relative to LGBTQ+ rights as an undergraduate in the early 2000s while earning her undergraduate degree in public policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology. That was a time that preceded, by a decade, the US Supreme Court decision granting same-sex marriage equality across the country. Also, most of the country then lacked employment, housing, and public accommodation protections for the LGBTQ+ community— particularly in the southern “bible belt” states. At best, a “don’t-ask-don’t-tell” policy meant many people knew a big part of themselves was not welcome in the workplace.

After graduating with honors, Tucker proceeded to attend law school at Georgia State University, where she won an award for her dedication to pro bono work and was an associate editor for the school’s law review.

Fast forward to today where she is assistant general counsel for Kimberly-Clark, the maker of personal care products for brands including Cottonelle, Depend, Huggies, Kleenex, and U by Kotex. She is able to lead on legal matters in this sprawling company by bringing her authentic self to work, which includes raising a family with her partner.

She reports her life has been largely untouched by discrimination. “I’ve had a good experience in Atlanta,” she says. “Atlanta is a major metropolitan area with a lot of diversity, cool thinkers—a place that fosters lots of good dialogue.” The same welcoming nature is strong at Kimberly-Clark, which she joined in 2022 after more than a decade of working as a law partner in private practice.

Keep in mind the very common consumer experience with Kimberly-Clark products:

tissues, toilet paper, diapers, and feminine products. Not only do many people use these products daily, but that use is intimate, meaning consumer trust is paramount.

Tucker is tasked with the legal side of product quality, regulatory, and compliance issues that protect consumers and the company. “Consumers expect our brands to be safe,” she says. “This includes products for babies, around which there are a lot of laws.”

Compounding the task is how the company operates in more than 175 countries, as does Tucker. Regulations in other countries aren’t always in sync with the US Food and Drug Administration, the agency that oversees some categories of personal care products. “Globally, there is variability with the FDA,” she explains. “We work with our legal partners in other countries to address these issues.”

Ideally, her work involves proactive risk management, preventing problems before they happen. She works closely with colleagues in far-flung locations, and she places a premium on face-to-face interaction. “You basically want to be the trusted advisor,” Tucker says. “I find that when working with anyone the most important thing is for them to understand the ‘why’ of what we’re doing.”

She acknowledges that, despite the preventive measures, a big part of her day involves reactive matter management. “It depends on the issue, whether it’s an internal investigation or litigation, but the most effective tool in most situations is to get the right people in the room,” she says. Part of her own expertise, which she brought to Kimberly-Clark from prior employment, comes from work with pharmaceuticals and medical devices. Those products included a variety of drugs and biologics, pain medications, diagnostic devices, surgical implants, cannabis, silica, cosmetics, and dietary supplements.

Through all of this, she hasn’t abandoned her roots in matters of social justice. Outside of

her work for Kimberly-Clark, Tucker has done pro bono work in support of immigrants seeking asylum in the US. “They can’t possibly navigate the system without legal help,” she emphasizes. Also, on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), she worked on a case involving reproductive rights and legal abortion access.

Tucker also involves herself, informally but consistently, in DEI activities at Kimberly-Clark and outside the company. In 2023 she served as a panelist in a discussion on what successful DEI looks like in the post-pandemic environment. “I think it’s important to stand up and participate,” she says. “At Kimberly-Clark, my experiences have been very positive and very inclusive. It’s an example where large corporations can be far ahead of other employers.”

That was one of several reasons she was attracted to the company. As well as, simply put, what it does and makes. “This company advances better care for a better world,” she says. “And with an inclusive atmosphere, I can show up as my authentic self.”

Gibson Dunn:

“We are thrilled to celebrate Sara’s accomplishments. Sara is a talented lawyer with a strong business mindset and we commend her on this well-deserved recognition for her contributions to the legal community.”

—Timothy Loose, Partner

Dana Morgan

Sara Tucker Assistant General Counsel of Quality & Regulatory Kimberly-Clark

A Grande Mindset

A MIX OF EMOTIONS FLOODED Shavondelia Brown when she put the phone down. The conversation with the recruiter went well. A coffee company based in the Pacific Northwest wanted to hire her to serve as corporate counsel on its real estate team, and the job seemed like a perfect fit, but Brown doesn’t drink coffee and had never set foot into Seattle.

It was 2004. The company had just opened manufacturing centers and retail stores in Amsterdam, Chile, Cyprus, Peru, Turkey, and France to bring its worldwide total to 8,569 locations.

Nearly twenty years into her tenure at Starbucks, Shavondelia Brown remains passionate about corporate real estate and about finding new ways to contribute to one of the world’s most beloved companies

By Zach Baliva

After nearly two decades at Starbucks, she’s leading a team of attorneys who support store development and corporate real estate for one of the most well-known, growth-focused companies in the world.

Brown has had a front-row seat to that growth; today, Starbucks has more than thirty-eight thousand locations in eighty countries. “I knew I would be a part of exponential growth because that was

made clear in my initial interview, but the experience has surpassed anything I could have imagined,” she emphasizes.

The growth was about more than real estate. While Brown was busy helping the company open a head-spinning total of 1,200 stores per year, others on her team and their counterparts in the organization increased everything from product selection to headcount. In addition to physical stores, the real estate legal team at Starbucks is responsible for offices, roasting and manufacturing plants, aviation facilities, and other areas of the company that fuel its operations. Today, Brown’s team also manages alcohol licensing and compliance while providing support to other areas of the business.

Through it all, Brown has kept her love of real estate while feeding another

passion for continuous learning. “Our business, just like our beverages, is customizable in many ways, so there’s always something to think about and learn,” she says.

A lot has changed at Starbucks. The siren logo was redone to celebrate its fortieth anniversary in 2011, and CEO Howard Schultz left the company in 2018 and returned from April 2022 to March 2023 as interim CEO. But a culture of constant growth and relentless innovation remains one of the constants. Brown has emerged as one of the company’s trusted leaders as she’s navigated the ups and downs of boom times, a global pandemic, and everything in between.

“My team and I have been purposeful about finding additional ways to contribute. Having people see what we

do raises the profile of our team as we help the company reach its goals,” she says. Brown’s steady hand, consistent presence, and strategic collaboration have elevated her team and earned her the reputation as a go-to partner for all things real estate.

Starbucks faces an important year in 2024. In November of last year, its leaders hosted an investor forum in which new CEO Laxman Narasimhan reinforced a 2022 reinvention plan that in part calls for cost cutting, growth, and innovation. Average weekly sales are beating pre-pandemic levels by double digits, leading Narasimhan to push for new investment in real estate, equipment, and store operations. Brown says store renovations and new store formats are just two parts of the plan—Starbucks is also doubling down

“Our business, just like our beverages, is customized in many ways, so there’s always something to think about and learn.”

on its commitment to ambitious environmental and social impact goals.

Nineteen years ago, Brown worked for one of the few Black woman general counsels in America. Today, the company is creating diversity among its leaders by tying compensation to the building of inclusive and diverse teams. Brown is committed to the cause, and the company has a supplier diversity goal of increasing annual spend with diverse suppliers from $882 million in fiscal year 2022 to $1.5 billion by 2030.

Nearly twenty years after she set foot in a Starbucks, Shavondelia Brown has become a fixture at the famed Starbucks Center corporate office. Thankfully, global expansion has given her plenty of options. Starbucks, after all, owns Teavana and has nearly fifty non-coffee options. While coffee and a core lineup account for eighty-five percent of sales, product innovation has been part of the company’s growth story. Starbucks has announced plans to further increase innovation by offering all-day breakfast and all-day snacks. New things are coming, and Brown is ready to help Starbucks add seventeen thousand new stores over the next six years.

—Margaret M. Jordan, Director

Charting Her Path

After making her mark as an antitrust lawyer, Sara Ciarelli Walsh stepped up to lead the legal team behind Google Maps. Together, they’re helping the tech giant innovate responsibly.

By Zach Baliva

WHILE MANY KIDS HER AGE WERE playing with a Cabbage Patch Kid or a Pound Puppy, Sara Ciarelli Walsh has different memories of a childhood in 1985: lying on the floor with her brother, poring over the atlas that came with their encyclopedia set.

It’s a fitting memory for Ciarelli Walsh, who serves as a director, legal at Google, and spoke to us in her individual capacity and not on behalf of Google. Although she’s been with the software giant since 2010, Ciarelli Walsh is now responsible for leading the attorneys who counsel Google’s Geo organization, which works on services like Google Maps, Google Earth, Waze, and other useful and popular services.

Today, Ciarelli Walsh is flourishing. The attorney, known as a veteran leader and a compassionate advisor, develops high-performing teams that deliver consistent results for a top tech company. But the Long Island native didn’t necessarily follow the traditional career path. Ciarelli Walsh started as a litigator-turned-antitrust lawyer and developed a map of her own to reach her desired destination atop a corporate legal team.

While it may not be one of the essential Latin phrases most lawyers know, “Sunt Dracones” has a special meaning for someone in Ciarelli Walsh’s position. The two words mean “here be dragons.” Medieval cartographers once scribbled it on the mysterious regions of a map, the spots where monsters, enemies, or other threats could lurk.

At Google Maps, one can never predict what lies ahead.

Over the last four years since she took on her new role, Ciarelli Walsh and her small-but-mighty team of seven have been helping Google optimize,

update, and improve its many products and services like Maps, Street View, and Waze that use mapping technologies.

For Ciarelli Walsh, it’s all about protecting the company as it pursues its goals.

“We have a lot of competition for all of our products, which makes balancing innovation and risk very important,” she explains.

Making a map, even when you have Google’s resources, is difficult work. “We all like to hop in our car and go

somewhere, but it’s not easy to replicate everything that exists on a global scale in a way that stays accurate when the world is changing every second of the day,” says Ciarelli Walsh.

It’s not just unexpected road detours and changing business hours that the team is up against. They’re also contending with international conflicts, global pandemics, and a steady stream of regulations. As a lawyer for Google Maps, Ciarelli Walsh must help

Saved Lists

We asked the Google Maps legal lead about her favorite maps feature. Here’s what she had to say:

“Google Lists and our saved lists feature is super exciting right now. You can make lists, assign emojis, and then share the list to collaborators with a lot of terrific customization.”

Whether you’re sharing the best selfie spots on a road trip or planning an epic bar crawl with your college buddies, Google has you covered.

Sara Ciarelli Walsh Director of Legal Google

Google make careful choices under intense pressure.

Google Maps now exists in more than 250 countries and territories. It tracks 200 million business and places, boasts more than 1 billion active users per month, and powers numerous products supported by the Google Maps platform.

Shortly after Ciarelli Walsh took the reins, Google and her team had to navigate the start of the COVID19 pandemic. Suddenly, users needed specific details to know with certainty whether pharmacies located inside retail stores were open on a given day and time.

“Our decision making has always been guided by a balance of utility versus the potential of harm,” she says. Google rolled out many COVID19 updates to provide useful updates for merchants and consumers so that information could be as accurate as possible. The company also released community mobility reports to help government officials make decisions about their communities.

Other events have put the dangers of broadcasting live traffic information in the spotlight. On February 24, 2022, users around the world watched an unusually heavy stream of traffic heading to Belgorod, Russia. The city on the Seversky Donets River sits less than thirty miles north of its border with Ukraine; users were watching Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion in real time. Google temporarily disabled its traffic layer in the region

for the safety of civilians living in nearby communities.

Ciarelli Walsh didn’t originally set out to lead a critical product team for a major tech company. She pivoted from her dream of pursuing the arts and instead attended law school, discovering a passion for antitrust law after working as a litigator as a law firm associate. Firm life prepared her to go in-house, and her tenure as a competition counsel gave her legacy knowledge she now relies on at Google.

Although Ciarelli Walsh’s role has changed, the top themes remain the same: she’s still thinking most about content regulation, privacy, and competition law. The sheer volume of laws passed and the work to be done can seem daunting, but Ciarelli Walsh relies on the dedicated legal professionals by her side. Together, they make tough choices while focusing on user needs. “If you help your clients build the best product possible, you will get where you need to go regardless of regulatory headwinds,” she says.

How does Ciarelli Walsh deal with the influx of work that never seems to stop? She’s made “ruthless prioritization” her motto. The simple phrase is the north star that will lead Ciarelli Walsh and her colleagues to success in 2024 and beyond.

We are proud to work with Sara Walsh

and the talented team at Google. Congratulations to Sara on her achievements and her recognition by Modern

Counsel.

Amplifying Voices and Protecting Rights at AARP

AARP Foundation Litigation works to advocate for people over the age of fifty in several class action lawsuits

By Joseph Stark

AS A NONPROFIT AND SOCIAL mission organization with over thirty-eight million members, the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) are longtime advocates for people over the age of fifty. They cover social security, Medicare, prescription drug prices, and other issues that concern retired people in the US. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the organization’s litigating arm, AARP Foundation Litigation. The foundation has actively taken to the courts to amplify the voices and protect the rights of AARP members in several cases.

Fighting Against Unlawful Servicing Fees

In 2023, AARP Foundation joined a class action lawsuit against reverse mortgage companies Compu-Link (Celink) and Reverse Mortgage Funding (RMF). The suit alleged the companies added various unlawful loan servicing fees that violate reverse mortgage contracts, federal law, and state laws. Plaintiffs are aiming not only to stop such unlawful and unreasonable costs, but also to remove unlawful and inflated fees, interests, and insurance charges from their loan balances.

“Older homeowners worked hard to pay their mortgages. When they borrow from their home equity so they can age in place, they deserve fair treatment and protection,” says William Alvarado Rivera, senior vice president of litigation for AARP Foundation, in a news release. “Protecting the home equity of vulnerable older homeowners from deceptive

and unfair practices is one of AARP Foundation’s strategic priorities.”

Fighting Against Age and Gender Discrimination

In a 2022 class action suit filed by Real Women in Trucking (RWIT) against Meta Platforms, the nonprofit alleged that Meta applies an advertisement delivery algorithm that relies on the age and gender of each user to determine which job advertisements those users will receive.

RWIT and AARP believe that Meta’s algorithm keeps certain jobs away from older people and women that advertisers pay Meta to show on Facebook. This is also the case when advertisers want to share their ads with people of all ages and genders, according to AARP. The Equal Opportunity Commission is currently investigating the charge.

Fighting Against Chronic and Intentional Understaffing at Nursing Facilities

Residents of six nursing facilities in Illinois filed a class action suit against Aden Group, one of the largest healthcare providers for older adults in the state. According to the complaint, Alden attracts thousands of residents to its facilities but systemically understaffs them to save millions of dollars each year. The understaffing has led to neglect, preventable injuries and illnesses, and unsanitary living conditions, according to an AARP news release.

AARP Foundation Litigation files and supports lawsuits that will have an impact on senior poverty by:

Reducing barriers to employment, including self-employment

Increasing access to public and private benefits

Protecting consumers by stopping unlawful business practices and securing refunds for those who lost money

Lowering out-of-pocket costs for key expenses, such as housing, food, and health care

Promoting more equitable outcomes across these areas

Steven Levin of Levin & Perconti, a Chicago law firm, said the class actions aims to “send a strong message to other nursing homes and assisted living facilities that they too will be held accountable for intentional staffing.” Kelsy Bennett, AARP’s VP and associate general counsel of litigation and compliance, has been able to win several class actions with no loss to AARP, furthering the company’s ability to protect those that AARP represents.

“As Alden profits, residents pay the prices,” he said in the release. “We see the results everyday as we represent residents who suffered serve injuries from falls, acquired pressure ulcers that worsened without treatment, or waited indefensibly long periods to be diagnosed with potentially life-threating conditions.”

Putting People First

AS THE ONLY GIRL IN A FAMILY OF BOYS,

Blaze Knott grew up knowing how to stick to her guns and how to speak up for herself. If you ask her parents, they’d tell you that she came into the world like that. Now as senior corporate counsel of employment at Delta Air Lines, she brings that energy to her work.

“My parents always said I came out of the womb in a blaze of glory and that was my personality from the get-go,” Knott says. “So, I always knew that pursuing a career in law suited that.”

Her natural ability to advocate for herself and others drove her to the University of Miami School of Law and to work on commercial and business litigation at the start of her career in 2013. While Knott had dreamed of working the profession, her true legal passion came when she was faced with her first labor and employment case.

Blaze Knott shares her journey to law, her passion for labor and employment, and more at Delta

Air Lines

By Noah Johnson

“Early in my career, a gender discrimination case came in the door, and I had a chance to work on it,” she recalls. “That piqued my interest in employment law immediately. . . It’s basically just people and people’s stories. You can never underestimate what people are going to do.”

After that case, Knott started splitting her workload between her business and commercial litigation matters and her

Blaze Knott Senior Corporate Counsel – Employment Delta Air Lines

employment cases. By 2016, she wanted more of the latter and took a leap of faith, joining Littler Mendelson as a labor and employment litigation associate. There, she handled a wide variety of matters including Title VII, discrimination, harassment, ADA, ADEA, retaliation, and more. It was the perfect role for the self-proclaimed employment law nerd, who had a chance to work with a variety of clients in different industries on employment issues.

“A lot of businesspeople say the worst part of their job is dealing with employee or personnel matters but that’s the part I love: all the different ins and outs of people,” Knott says. “What makes them tick, what makes them motivated and engaged, what

makes them leave, what makes them sue, what helps when they do so. It’s a good cross-section of science, social sciences, psychology, and the law.”

In 2020, Knott joined Delta Air Lines as corporate employment counsel. While she never had dreams of working in-house, she was drawn to the role because of Delta’s industry leading reputation as an employer.

“As an employment law nerd, I had followed the things Delta had done such as being an award-winning workplace for employee engagement,” she says. “They were really like a tech company in terms of how they approached their employees, but they did it in a very different industry and while headquartered in the Southeast. So, we’re a bit of

a unicorn in that respect in addition to our strong people-first culture.”

In her role, she prides herself on being a living example of Delta’s people-first values by being a relationship-driven leader.

“Everything comes out of relationships. Just like in private practice, it’s about how to best serve your clients when you’re in-house and getting to foster those relationships,” Knott says.

“You need to understand what motivates your partners, what are they driving for, what are their strategy goals, and how can I be effective in furthering that.”

Knott began her tenure during the COVID-19 pandemic, which was devastating to the transportation world,

but she was also able to fill it with many highlights. Right now, she is focused on employment law trends and helping the company have an optimal workforce amid a challenging macroeconomic environment.

Knott and her team are uniquely positioned to add value to those considerations by the nature of their work. But the company is also intentional about allowing its employees to be “stretch players,” which has given Knott the opportunity to explore different areas of the business and the law.

“We’re really encouraged to expand our knowledge base and to spread our wings,” she says. “Right now, I’m developing my skill set in other areas such as executive compensation, international employment, and employee privacy as well as various facets of HR. It’s my favorite thing about law: that it’s a license to learn.”

Knott’s tenure at Delta has also marked her journey as a parent. It’s one that has transformed her outlook on her work.

“We spend so much time at work, which is why it’s important to weigh that priority against the example you set for your children,” Knott says. “For me, I’m proud to be doing work that’s good for the world and for the community. And when I’m not at work, I strive to be present in whatever I’m doing and the time I spend with family.”

CDF Labor Law LLP:

“Working with Blaze is a seamless experience. As Delta Air Lines’ in-house employment counsel, Blaze oversees complex employment litigation while having a keen eye on creative solutions for risk avoidance. Blaze is a strategic thinker and a true collaborator.”

—Dawn Irizarry, Partner

For 30 years, CDF has distinguished itself as a premier California labor and employment defense firm, representing employers in single-plaintiff, class and collective actions, and advising clients on related legal compliance and risk avoidance. Defend & Advise

Irizarry Esq.

Helping Allen Media Aim for the Top

Mark DeVitre shares his journey to Allen Media and the company’s successes, systemic challenges, and hopes for the future

By Noah Johnson

AFTER TWENTY YEARS OF WORKING as in-house counsel in various media companies, Mark DeVitre was eight months into starting his own media law practice when he met Byron Allen, founder, chairman, and CEO of Allen Media Group. The company needed

help navigating complicated deals and contracts for a pair of scripted sitcoms, and with DeVitre’s decades of legal experience working for the likes of Warner Bros., Fox, and various other media entities, he was the man for the job.

At first, he believed it was an opportunity to add a great new client to his list. But Allen had other plans.

“After a few meetings, Byron said he loved my work and wanted me to move in-house full-time. I was hesitant at first because I had started to gather clients

DeVitre EVP & General Counsel

Allen Media Group

Mark

“Today, we’re now treated like a big kid on the block, and you can’t ignore us like you used to. We matter, and we’re not going anywhere.”

and build up a business. But he said, ‘Finish that up and then come work for me. I’ll make it worth your while. I’m going to build the world’s biggest media company and I need the best team in the business,’” DeVitre says.

Inspired by Allen’s vision and his excitement, DeVitre came aboard as executive vice president and general counsel in 2012. Since then, the company has grown from having just over fifty employees primarily in Los Angeles to now 2,400 throughout the US, with 11 lawyers as part of the GC’s legal team.

Much of this growth was through strategic acquisitions both small and large, most notably the 2018 acquisition of The Weather Channel, the country’s leading weather news service for more than forty years, and the multiyear assembly of a broadcast station group of twenty-eight stations in twenty-one markets, all affiliated with the ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox broadcast networks.

Allen Media has invested heavily in the future of local news through its popular digital app, Local Now, a leading free streaming service that offers hyperlocal news, weather, sports, and entertainment based on the user’s ZIP code. Even as the company has grown into a vertically integrated, digital media company, it has stuck to its roots, becoming one of the largest independent producers and distributors of first-run syndicated television programming for United States broadcast stations.

DeVitre admits that many of those accomplishments didn’t come easily and some strides had to be fought for in court. He and his colleagues have spent much of the past decade publicizing the disparities they see in the market, convincing some to partner with African American owned media, while also pursuing racial discrimination-based lawsuits against large companies accused of not giving Black-owned media its fair share of access to the public audience

and withholding channel carriage, related advertising, and investment dollars.

He says those cases were an opportunity to tackle systemic issues that Allen and other African American entrepreneurs had contended with for decades.

“Byron had to build his company outside of the normal system because he couldn’t access the kind of capital and resources that all of his competitors did,” DeVitre says.

“So, a big part of our strategy in building the company was to say, ‘We’re not going to sit here and be discriminated against as a Black-owned media company.’ It’s not mentioned enough, but African Americans constitute 14 percent of the US population currently, and research has shown time and again that they as a group are massive consumers of media and advertising; but their access to being owners and creators of that media and related equity has not followed suit. Byron had the resources to fight, but he shouldn’t be a unicorn and he’d be the first to say it. Black-owned media must have a seat at the table,” he says.

Ultimately, all those suits settled, and the company has expanded its distribution of programming across the media landscape, recently launching an HBCU Sports division to bring Black college football, basketball, and the HBCU college experience to its largest audience ever across broadcast, cable, and streaming.

“Today, we’re now treated like a big kid on the block, and you can’t ignore us like you used to. We matter, and we’re not going anywhere. With Byron’s leadership, we’ve built a company with amazing assets that have created a certain amount of scale in the media space making us a real presence in that landscape.”

DeVitre and his legal team at Allen Media are looking forward to building on those successes in the new year. They’re always on the “hunt for big assets,” DeVitre says.

“Last year, we took a very strong run at buying BET (Black Entertainment Television founded in 1980 by African American media entrepreneur, Bob Johnson) from Paramount

What Makes Byron Allen a Good Leader?

“One of the greatest things I’ve learned from him, having come from a background of working for large corporations and studios, is that you have to be smart and efficient with time and resources. To that end, it’s great to have a visionary leading the way saying, ‘Here’s what I want to do.’ He is open to all ideas, but as a team, we’re committed to executing on his vision, whether that’s cornering the market in TV syndication; acquiring or selling assets; or making strategic deals with bigger companies.”

—Mark DeVitre

Allen Media Isn’t the World’s Biggest Media Company Yet, But It’s Inching Closer

“Starting from his dining room table 30 years ago trying to sell his first show to 1,300 American TV stations, Byron has grown Allen Media from a small TV syndication company to a vertically integrated media company that all of Wall Street, the major studios, media companies, and advertisers know about, acknowledge, and work with. We’re now a thriving part of that ecosystem. We may not be the biggest yet, but you could open the paper tomorrow to see ‘Byron acquires Paramount Global, Disney’s television and cable business, or the Tegna station group,’ or all of them for that matter. Like a modern-day Rupert Murdoch, Byron wants to build, own, and operate the world’s biggest and best media business.”

—Mark DeVitre

Global, but unfortunately, they pulled the process and didn’t sell the business to anyone, including Byron or Tyler Perry, who both bid. Byron has made it clear that BET should, once again, be owned by African Americans, so we still have to be in that discussion,” DeVitre says.

“He’s also publicly said he’d like to buy other big media assets like the ABC network and station group, along with the Disney cable channels, the Tegna station group and, if it became available, not just BET but all of Paramount Global. So, I would expect to see us continue to fire on all cylinders as we try to achieve Byron’s vision for Allen Media,” he says.

So, how much closer are Allen, DeVitre, and the Allen Media team to that vision? DeVitre has reason to believe they’re on their way.

Allen recently asked six of the longtime, senior executives, including DeVitre, to join the formerly three-member board of directors as an acknowledgment that Allen Media has grown into a more mature company. The CEO wants

Expertise Spotlight

Miller Barondess LLP is a Los Angeles-based law firm specializing in litigation, trial, and appellate work in California and around the country.

Founded in 2006 by trial lawyer Skip Miller, Miller Barondess, LLP has grown to forty-five attorneys— including his sons Dan and Jim, as well as partners

Mark Barondess and Sasha Frid—specializing in a wide range of sectors such as intellectual property, technology, real estate, healthcare, securities, entertainment and music, sports, consumer products, insurance, retail, environmental, licensing and branding, financial services, and government. The firm’s attorneys have been lead counsel in hundreds of state and federal trials and arbitrations, and have prevailed against some of the largest corporations in the world with hundreds of millions of dollars at stake. With a reputation for winning bet-the-company litigation, clients frequently hire Miller Barondess to “save the day” before trial. The firm is recognized as a U.S. Best Law Firm®, a top twenty-five litigation firm in Los Angeles by Business of Law magazine, and a “Most Admired Law Firm to Work For” by the Los Angeles Business Journal

to move even faster with decision-making authority that can identify and close both strategic and accretive deals.

“I think that signaled that Byron is getting even more serious about his big passion, building the world’s biggest media company,” DeVitre says.

“Most of the other major media conglomerates, like Disney, Paramount, Warner Bros., and Comcast, are in a difficult period of time due to the continuing media and consumer migration to digital platforms and streaming.

“That competition between them all, with the related costs of trying to steer their large, unwieldy ships in that direction, seriously hurt their balance sheets and their legacy businesses,” he continues.

“Meanwhile, at Allen Media, we’re actually growing in both legacy and digital media, and I believe 2024 will be our biggest year yet,” he says.

April Lindauer Is All In at Carta

April Lindauer was quick to make the move in-house. Now, the financial services lawyer is helping Carta disrupt an industry and bring equity ownership to more people.

By Zach Baliva

APRIL LINDAUER GRADUATED FROM DePaul University College of Law and was settling into life as an associate attorney at a Chicago law firm. Some of her former classmates were striving to log as many billable hours as possible while others were busy trying to uncover secret shortcuts on the path to partner. Lindauer was making other plans. After just four years, she exited her firm for a role as corporate counsel. Whether driven by a desire to influence business decisions or to find a better way to balance competing work and life demands, many lawyers eventually make the move in-house. Most, however, tend to spend more time developing their skills and networks within large practices. But in 2007, Lindauer knew she was ready. “I

had worked before law school and grew up around lawyers,” she explains. “I made the jump in-house and have never looked back.”

She grew up as the middle child in a family of five. While each of her siblings took a turn working in their dad’s Arizona law practice, she took a special interest in his work. At first, Lindauer would simply answer phones or file documents. Later, however, she would accompany her father to court and type letters and briefs as he recited them to her from memory.

After earning a degree in psychology from the University of Chicago, Lindauer worked as a project manager at Hewitt Associates before enrolling at DePaul. While there, she interned with the National

Association of Securities Dealers (now known as FINRA) in the wake of the dot-com bust.

Exposure to financial services law combined with her background and education prepared Lindauer to thrive as corporate counsel. After nearly five years at Computershare, she helped build a regulatory compliance program at Encore Capital Group and then served as a compliance officer at Assurant before joining fintech startup Carta as its deputy general counsel in 2018. Carta’s suite of tech products and services help more than forty thousand corporate clients manage capitalization tables and valuations. Carta also supports thousands of funds and special purpose vehicles.

April Lindauer

General Counsel

Carta

“To scale, finding the right people and partners is instrumental to our success. You need people on the ground who can because they help us amass the right knowledge and get the right people on the ground when and where you need them.”

The innovative and fastgrowing company is disrupting its industry with things like electronic issuance of stock, transparent compensation planning, easier scenario modeling, and automated back-office fun administration tools. Carta’s software removes barriers to investing. In the decade since Carta started issuing stock certificates as e-shares, the company has evolved into a full-service platform that manages $3 trillion for more than two million stakeholders.

To find success, Carta had to move in-step with constant changes in the venture capital community and the tech market alike. Meeting that challenge is part of what first drew Lindauer to Carta. “I knew Carta had the chance to do something special by creating more employee stock owners and addressing an equity gap that exists in the world of startups,” she says.

When Lindauer joined Carta in 2018, the company had finished its Series C funding round. She collaborated with her counterparts in operations to build the compliance infrastructure that would help Carta scale.

Carta then entered an important phase as leaders added fund administration services and liquidity solutions while expanding its core business. Lindauer became an important sounding board regarding related legal issues and worked closely with Carta’s chief people officer as its workforce climbed

from two hundred to almost two thousand employees. She was promoted to general counsel in 2020.

Today, Carta continues to scale as leaders focus on continued international expansion. Thus, Lindauer is working behind the scenes to ensure they have a good understanding of global jurisdictions and their regulatory requirements. She hired a data privacy legal expert, formed relationships with partner law and accounting firms, and now oversees legal and compliance teams standing by in Singapore and the United Kingdom.

“To scale, finding the right people and partners is instrumental to our success. You need people on the ground who can because they help us amass the right knowledge and get the right people on the ground when and where you need them,” Lindauer says.

Like other legal teams across the nation and world, Lindauer’s is now focused on finding new ways to use automation to replace manual, time-consuming tasks. While her legal team already uses software to track law firm spending and manage contracts, the department is hoping to use additional digital tools to enhance its legal and compliance programs in the future.

The move will help Lindauer accomplish more work with the same amount of people. Her legal and compliance department is home to about forty-five individuals in various locations. While

Lindauer hasn’t met some of them in person, she is careful to find ways to build strong relationships. “It’s important for a leader to ask questions and solicit feedback,” she says. Lindauer, who often benefited from good internships and strong mentors, now looks to provide similar support to others.

Carta is quickly launching new products as it doubles down on efforts to expand internationally, and Lindauer says that mentorship and support will be even more important as they grow.

Lindauer says she’s glad she made the move in-house more than fifteen years ago. “For me, it’s always been more about the work and the people than in-house versus firm.”

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Gordon Rees Scully Mansukhani, LLP:

“April Lindauer is my favorite general counsel to work with. She’s funny and smart and reasonable. The scope of her responsibilities at Carta and breadth of her expertise boggles my mind.”

—Mike Laurenson, Partner

Venable, LLP:

“April has a wealth of experience in managing legal affairs and has enabled Carta to succeed in its business endeavors. She has led the way in recruiting a stellar legal department, manages multiple product development counsel, and keeps her client out of trouble in multiple jurisdictions. She and her exceptional legal team are adept at balancing the business at hand with the larger relationship that’s in play.”

—Jonathan L. Pompan, Partner

A Taxing Endeavor

How do you get people to care about something that makes them cringe? That’s a question Emily O’Brien tackles as deputy chief tax counsel to much success.

By Noah Johnson

STAKEHOLDERS AROUND THE country have been aggressively pursuing a path to a clean energy economy in hopes of curbing climate change effects and driving environmental justice. Out of that mission has come the Inflation Reduction Act, a 2022 law that aims to deliver climate results through a combination of grants, loans, rebates, incentives, and other investments in the clean energy sector.

As a leading retail electricity and power generation company, Vistra Cor-

poration stands on the cutting edge of those efforts, and Emily O’Brien, who serves as deputy chief tax counsel for the company, is helping it capitalize on the opportunity.

“One of our main focuses at Vistra is energy expansion, making sure we have a grid that’s reliable, affordable, and sustainable,” says O’Brien, who’s been with the company since 2013 and is responsible for all things tax. “And the provisions in [the IRA] that will allow us to push that vision forward are tax-

driven and are very complicated. They include these complex calculations, and it’s all brand new. It’s exciting because it’s like we’re all figuring it out together.”

Over the past year-and-a-half, O’Brien, a tax attorney with over a decade of experience, has been explaining the new rules to leadership and helping to implement them. It’s quite the task getting people to see the value of an area that would normally make them cringe. But it’s one that O’Brien is particularly passionate about.

Deputy Chief Tax Counsel

Emily O’Brien

Vistra Corp

“The more you can understand where someone is coming from, the more you can bridge gaps and give information that will be helpful for them.”

“Taking complex issues and making them accessible to non-lawyers or tax people is my favorite part of the job,” she says. “The truth is, no one wants to hear about tax, and step one is understanding that.” O’Brien recommends building relationships to educate others and highlight how tax can add value to the company’s broader strategic plans to explain why tax matters and what the solution is.

Tax attorneys or professionals that are attempting to do the same might benefit from something O’Brien learned from one of her leaders.

“If you give people the right information, they’ll usually make the right decision,” she emphasizes. “Try to keep that in mind. Another important thing is to have emotional intelligence—the more you can understand where someone is coming from, the more you can bridge gaps and give information that will be helpful for them.”

Before Vistra, O’Brien started her career as an associate at Vinson & Elkins, where she developed the foundation she’d need to thrive throughout the rest of her career.

“My early years were a learning curve. It was a lot of observing and

absorbing from the people around me,” she says. “I got to see different areas of tax, different industries, and got to see what I liked. I found out that I was really drawn to the work that I did with my energy clients and knew that was where I wanted to be.”

After two years in that role, O’Brien moved in-house at Energy Future Holdings, the predecessor company of Vistra Corp. Since then, she has got to work on non-income tax, bankruptcy, M&A integrations, and more. She and her colleagues have also gotten a chance to focus on advocacy, ensuring that the company’s interests are represented in clean energy laws.

“Often times, legislators come up with bills that don’t always align with the way work gets done on the ground,” O’Brien reflects. “If you don’t get your voice out there, certain things might not work in practice.”

As a leader, O’Brien prides herself on valuing empathy and giving her teams “a lot of grace.” She not only wants them to have room to grow and make mistakes, but also wants them to have work/life flexibility. It’s a company value that’s reflected in its hybrid-work arrangement,

which is particularly advantageous to legal professionals.

“It’s the best of both worlds. It’s an opportunity to collaborate in person but to also have the time for quiet contemplation at home that so many legal jobs require,” she says.

O’Brien is proud to have helped to cultivate a positive, respectful, and collaborative work environment. That’s only possible when leaders lead by example, she says.

“The tone starts at the top. Leaders have to live the same energy they’re expecting of others,” she emphasizes. “If they encourage communication, discussion, offer a lot of grace, that leads to trust and respect and the best business results.”

She continues: “I want to make employees feel like they can bring their whole selves to work because a whole person brings so much more value.”

Vinson & Elkins LLP:

“It has been a privilege to watch Emily’s career growth and to work with her in supporting Vistra’s business mission.”

—David Peck, Tax Partner and Head of Tax Department

KPMG LLP:

“I have worked with Emily for ten years, and I am continually impressed with Emily’s intelligent approach to solving complex tax problems. Emily is a great client to partner with—we have worked through many novel transactions together and she always makes it enjoyable and interesting. I am also admirable of Emily’s commitment to her family and the way she harmonizes her work and personal priorities.”

—Stacy Lyons, KPMG Tax Partner

Vinson & Elkins LLP:

“At Vinson & Elkins, Emily demonstrated the intelligence and people skills that have made her such an effective leader at Vistra.”

—Wendy Salinas, Tax Partner

Defining Leadership

Vinson & Elkins is proud to recognize Emily O’Brien for her contributions as Vistra Corp.’s Deputy Chief Tax Counsel.

We are proud to assist her in crafting effective, strategic legal solutions that help drive the industry forward.

Naim Surgeon Trusts His Instincts

Naim Surgeon dives into his struggles with self-doubt, his “don’t say no” policy, and his commitment to owning problems

By Joseph Stark

AT NEXTERA ENERGY RESOURCES, Naim Surgeon serves as managing attorney of litigation—a fitting role for an intellectually curious problem-solver. While Surgeon has spent his career tackling complex cases and has made it to the pinnacle of his profession, he says that it took time to realize the potential others saw in him.

“Part of what you’re trying to do as a lawyer is stand on your own two feet, really showing that your training and experience have given you the judgment to handle a matter on your own from beginning to end and to make strategic decisions to drive your case to the right result,” he reflects. “But as a first-generation lawyer whose parents had a high school education, I sometimes ques -

tioned whether I belonged here or if I had what it took, even when others said I did.”

He continues: “When you’re in a space that your family can’t help you navigate, you feel like you don’t know where you are or what you should do.”

In the end, his doubts were no match for his hunger to learn. After a career as a computer programmer, Surgeon got his start in law as an M&A associate at Sills, Cummins & Gross before shifting to complex litigation at Akerman LLP. As one of the most junior members of his team at the latter firm, he made a commitment to having a “don’t say no” policy and to seize any opportunity he could, even ones that were above his experience level. That mentality

helped him rise the ranks and rack up a number of trial wins, including a case in federal court where he served as first chair.

There’s a moment from the trial that continues to resonate with him.

“We had a decision to make about something, and I had one of those Ally McBeal cutaways where I was observing everything and thinking, ‘Wow, I actually know what to do here,’” he recalls. “To me, that was a confirmation that I belonged, and it was a source of pride. It wasn’t about proving it to anyone else but to know it for myself.”’

After making partner at Akerman and spending a year as a litigation partner at Stroock & Stroock & Lavan LLP, Surgeon was ready for a new

challenge. NextEra, one of the largest renewable energy companies in the world, was a logical next step for the lifelong learner.

“Something I care very much about is generating solutions to problems that we all face as humans on Earth,” he says. “Another thing that drew me to the company was the fact that there’s so many business lines. What I initially thought the company did was only a tenth of what it actually does. Even now, I go to work and have issues that are completely new and terribly interesting coming across my desk every day. There’s myriad opportunities to understand these new businesses and to contribute to our mission of decarbonization.”

An insatiable curiosity, a missiondriven mindset, and litigation expertise aren’t the only traits Surgeon brought to NextEra. Another one is his commitment to owning a problem. It’s a perspective that was particularly valuable during his first year in the company, as he adjusted to his role and got to know his colleagues while taking on matters that predated his employment. Sometimes it was as simple as offering his opinion on a matter, even when his colleagues didn’t expect him to. Other times, ownership took the form of keeping a cool head during contentious negotiations. In either case, that kind of ownership has allowed him to thrive in his role in more ways than one.

Excellence. Dedication. Leadership.

A consummate lawyer and counselor, Naim Surgeon sets the standard for excellence in law, character, and leadership.

Akerman salutes our friend, mentor, and past partner on his achievements, and we watch with admiration as he delivers great results for NextEra Energy Resources.

For more than 160 years, Winston & Strawn has served as a trusted advisor and advocate to companies in a broad array of industries. The firm has built a global law practice based on an uncompromising commitment to quality and client service.

Michael Marsh Partner, Litigation Fort Lauderdale | Miami 305 982 5507

michael.marsh@akerman.com

Barbara Edwards Partner, Corporate New York 212 259 8706 barbara.edwards@akerman.com

“Owning a problem and taking it on to help provide results separates good lawyers from great lawyers,” he says.

“I’m dutiful about what I feel I’m responsible for. That pays dividends—not just in terms of reputational benefits, but in terms of building trust and building rapport. Some people may have an impulse to pass a problem off. But even though it may not be your problem, you can guide it into the hands of someone who can own it and take it seriously.”

With opportunities to learn and advance the companies mission have come chances to help Surgeon’s team advance in their careers. He believes it’s also his responsibility to invest in others because of how many of his mentors have invested in him.

“As a leader, it’s your job to figure out what people care about and put them in positions to do that. That requires you to invest in your people and to be deliberate about doing that,” he says.

If Surgeon were to offer advice to a young version of himself, he’d say, “Trust your instincts.”

“You got here for a reason,” Surgeon says. “Trust you can navigate new and foreign spaces and that people along the way will help you get where you want to go. Believe you can do it because you can.”

Winston & Strawn:

“I really enjoy working with Naim Surgeon at NextEra Energy. He is insightful, strategic, and highly effective on complex litigation matters. Partnering with Naim on a case is truly a pleasure.”

—Tom Walsh, Partner

People & Companies

Marjorie Adams P166

Ferring Pharmaceuticals

Dipo Ashiru P66

Veritas Capital

John Pollack

Partner, Cochair of Private Equity

Gibson Dunn

212.351.3903

jpollack@gibsondunn.com

John Pollack is cochair of Gibson Dunn’s Private Equity Group. He regularly represents private equity firms and their portfolio companies on US and crossborder transactions.

Nicole Washington, P.C.

Partner

Kirkland & Ellis LLP

212.446. 4847

nicole.washington@kirkland.com

Nicole Washington is a partner of Kirkland & Ellis, where she advises sponsors on fund formation, secondaries, GP strategic advisory, and other investment management matters.

Scholastica Baker P94

McDonald’s Corporation

Jourdan Cabe Ball P47

Compass Group

Hilary Barrett P60

PENN Entertainment

Susan Barrett P132

Monte Nido & Affiliates

Kelsy Bennett P204

AARP

Michelle Bergman P121

Vestar Capital Partners

Kenyatta S. Beverly P124 The Davey Tree Expert Company

Anna Claveria Brannan P113

IPSY

Shavondelia Brown P197

Starbucks

James Butler P10 Ansys

Jan Fink Call P84 DSM-Firmenich

Averill Conn P190

Vitol

Elizabeth Corbett P106 Affirm

Joseph D’Angelo P144 Analog Devices Inc.

Mark DeVitre P210 Allen Media Group

Skip Miller Partner

Miller Barondess, LLP

310.552.5251

smiller@millerbarondess.com

Skip focuses on litigation involving securities, entertainment, sports, investment banking, defamation, First Amendment, copyright, civil rights, real estate, contracts, partnerships, unfair competition, environmental, energy, and government.

Tracey Van Dillen P173

Kenvue

Carolyn Drayer-Greenwalt P18 Patient Square Capital

Lindette Hassan P159

BASF

Jaime Heins P147

EBlock

Anne Hilby P29 Zipline

Aleka Jones P116

Cox Media Group

Joseph Keller P63

Lockheed Martin

Masai-Maliek King P76 State Street Corporation

Blaze Knott P207

Delta Air Lines

Kevin Larner P80 AIG

Rebecca Letourneaux P90

William Blair

April Lindauer P216

Carta

Katrina Lindsey P150

Casey’s General Stores

Sam Logan P22 Afiniti

Lisa Mingoia P110 Skanska

Emily O’Brien P220 Vistra Corp

David Oskandy P100 CDW

Kristofer Swanson

CPA/CFF, CAMS, CFE, VP and Global Forensic Services Practice Leader

Charles River Associates (CRA) 312.619.3313 kswanson@crai.com

Kristofer Swanson leads complex and highly confidential investigations, requiring deep industry knowledge, multiple technical competencies, and the ability to testify on both liability and damages.

Sanil Padiyedathu P140

Verizon

Robert Peters P169

Walgreens Boots Alliance

Jonathan Rabin P178 Natera Inc.

Desiree Ralls-Morrison P32

McDonald’s Corporation

John C. Hueston Partner

Hueston Hennigan LLP

949.226.6740

jhueston@hueston.com

John Hueston, described by Chambers and Partners as “the best lawyer of his generation,” represents Fortune 500 companies and governments as lead counsel in their most challenging and high-profile cases and investigations.

Shirmila Ramasamy P128 The World Bank

Beth Ryan P162 ConocoPhillips

Truan Savage P26 TIDAL

Steven Scrogham P14 ProFrac Services

Erin Sedloff P154 Mainsail Partners

Alex Allemann

Shareholder Winstead PC

512.370.2804

aallemann@winstead.com

Alex Allemann focuses on mergers and acquisitions, corporate finance, and general corporate and securities matters. He regularly works with emerging growth companies throughout their life cycle.

George Stephanopoulos P136

Vox Media

Naim Surgeon P224

NextEra Energy Resources

Bob Tronnes P52

eBay

Ian C. Ballon

Shareholder | Global Co-Chair of the Intellectual Property & Technology Practice Group

Greenberg Traurig, LLP

310.586.6575

ballon@gtlaw.com

Ian C. Ballon, author of a leading treatise on internet law, serves as lead counsel in copyright, DMCA, trademark, trade secret, and right of publicity. He also serves as lead counsel in software, database and AI litigation, as well as in defending data privacy, cybersecurity breach, AdTech, and internet-related class action suits.

Sara Tucker P194

Kimberly-Clark

Daphne Walker P184 JPS Health Network

Sara Ciarelli Walsh P200

Google

Victor Wright P44

Baker Hughes

With eBay as the cover of this litigation issue, Modern Counsel decided to order some antique items from eBay (and borrow items from the editorial team) to showcase the treasures that can be found on the resale site.

Here are some of our favorite items featured throughout the issue and their retail value on eBay:

(1) Lawyer Russ Troll Doll (manufactured around 1992)

(2) Mr. Potato Head (manufactured in 1996)

(3) Zebra Furby (manufactured in 1999)

(4) iPod 4th generation (manufactured in 2008)

(5) Barbie Pink Glitter Glam 2 Seater Convertible Car (manufactured in 2013)