Frank E. Pasquesi, partner with Foley & Lardner and office managing partner of the firm’s Chicago office, was recently appointed general counsel of the Western Golf Association Evans Scholars Foundation.
Pasquesi is a former Chick Evans Scholar of Northwestern University.
Kurt Ehresman, 52-year-old former senior counsel for global intellectual property at Hershey Co., has sued his ex-employer, claiming he was replaced with a younger, black, female lawyer in a case of race, age and sex bias.
Ehresman, who is white, filed suit Feb. 6 with the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania, according to a Bloomberg Law report.
Bloomberg’s Patrick Dorrian writes:
“The move came roughly five years after Hershey recruited him to be ‘the first licensed practice attorney’ in the candymaker’s more than 100-year history, Ehresman charges in the complaint. And it required him to give up his ‘entire portfolio of clients’ and private practice as a condition of joining Hershey, Ehresman says.”
Read the Bloomberg Law article.
Bob Young, fired last week as Michigan State University’s general counsel, will receive at least $990,402 in departing the university, school spokeswoman Emily Guerrant said Wednesday.
The Detroit Free Press reports that Young, the university’s top lawyer, had a three-year contract that paid $425,000 a year in salary. The lump sum paid off the balance of the contract.
“Young had been brought in by interim President John Engler to guide the school’s legal strategy as it dealt with the fallout from the Larry Nassar sexual assaults scandal, including hundreds of lawsuits filed by victims of the former MSU doctor. The first round of those suits ended in a $500-million settlement,” according to Free Press reporter David Jesse.
Onit has published a case study showing how TIAA embarked on a journey that leverages best-in-class technologies, onshore and offshore partners, and innovation to bring together an efficient resource mix that enables the highest and best use of each law professional’s time.
The case study can be downloaded at no charge.
As TIAA law department’s chief operating officer and chief of staff for the past two years, Brad Rogers was tasked with transforming the entire legal operations function by bringing together law department employees and vendor partners from across the world to streamline processes and implement a comprehensive technology platform with capabilities rooted in process, workflow and collaboration that would allow the best use of each law professional’s time.
Merry Neitlich of EM Consultants tells the story of the legal department of a Fortune 500 company its legal operations practices and interactions with its internal clients. Under the leadership of the senior vice president and general counsel, the legal department of 35 attorneys decided to ask their internal clients at the company how their services were being viewed and what could be done to improve upon them.
“The participants filled out a fourteen-question short answer continuum-based questionnaire,” explains Neitlich. “This information was transferred into graphs which allowed the attorneys to visually see their service strengths and weaknesses at a glance. The in-person feedback reports combined with the statistical data provided a deeper level of knowledge. ”
The article describes participants’ perception of the legal department, areas for possible improvement, internal communications, workflow options, human resources, and relationships with outside law firms.
Michigan State University has removed former Michigan Supreme Court Justice Bob Young as its general counsel, reports the Lansing State Journal.
Young’s last day was Friday, eight months after he started in the job.
Young’s salary at MSU was $425,000 per year. He had a contract that ran through May 31, 2021, making its total value $1.275 million.
“A university spokeswoman said Young will receive a full payout of that contract,” writes the State Journal‘s Matt Mencarini. “That would mean the university will pay about $1 million on the remaining balance.”
Read the Lansing State Journal article.
Three senior in-house attorneys discussed best practices for collaborating with outside counsel during a panel discussion at Ward and Smith’s 2018 In-House Counsel Seminar, with a focus on leveraging technology, controlling legal spend, and managing succession.
A report on the discussion is posted on the Ward and Smith website.
Ward and Smith attorney Paul Fanning moderated a panel featuring Brian Holland, General Counsel for Global Knowledge, Kelly Clay, Global eDiscovery Counsel and Head of Data Governance at GlaxoSmithKline, and Ken Hammer, Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer at Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions.
Bloomberg Law reports that Generic drug distributor P&L Development LLC’s general counsel and an outside firm may continue to represent P&L in its breach-of-contract and fraud suit against Bionpharma Inc., a federal court in North Carolina ruled.
Bionpharma wanted to disqualify Charles Cain, P&L’s general counsel. P&L is suing Bion for breach of supply agreements that Cain approved when he was general counsel at a defunct predecessor of Bion’s, explains Bloomberg’s Martina Barash.
But any confidential information about the predecessor’s capabilities that Cain acquired during the agreements’ drafting wouldn’t help P&L in this suit, the court said.
Read the Bloomberg Law article.
RFP Advisory Group will present a complimentary webinar where attendees will learn best practices and obstacles to avoid when issuing a request for proposal (RFP) to law firms.
The webinar will be Wednesday, Feb. 16, 2019, beginning at 1 p.m. EST.
RFP Advisory Group says that RFPs can allow a legal department to:
* Identify how many, and which law firms are the best fit for your business goals
* Incorporate the latest technology and innovations into your legal strategy
* Negotiate rates that will ensure that you are getting the most value for your dollar
* Convert your billing structures to alternative fee arrangements (“AFAs”)
* Increase diversity of the lawyers working on your companies matters
* Create a consistent set of outside counsel guidelines
However, RFPs can be labor intensive and a disaster to manage when done incorrectly, especially when done by general counsel with no legal operations or procurement staff to support the process, the RFP Advisory Group says. This webinar is ideal for general counsel who have been considering issuing an RFP but need to learn more about the latest trends and best practices.
By Justin Perkins
Contract Logix
With more than two-thirds of CEOs expecting their business models to change in the next three years, it’s no surprise that digital transformation continues to be a strategic priority for organizations of all industries and sizes.
What is surprising, however, is that a recent study by Gartner revealed an astonishing 81% of legal departments are not prepared to support their company’s digitization process. That’s a worrisome figure given that legal departments and the contracts they execute define our business relationships and are the backbone of any organization.
The good news for legal is that digitization, at least when it comes to contract management, has never been easier. By embracing software that’s built specifically to support contract lifecycle management, legal teams can shift from laggard to leader in the execution of their organizations’ digital transformation.
The question then becomes, where and how should a legal organization begin the process? Let’s look at the first and most critical step to take when setting the foundation for contract – and legal — digitization.
Digitize and Centralize All Your Contracts in Secure Repository
It’s not uncommon for legal departments to store contracts in shared folders across multiple locations and formats. However, centralizing your agreements into an electronic contract repository is the all-important first step towards the digital transformation of your contract management processes.
Think about how often you or your team need to reference or find an agreement. Whether you’re locating a specific detail or reviewing the entire contract before a renewal or termination, there are many reasons why an online, centralized repository is a foundational element to your legal digitization.
Not only will it keep your agreements organized, it greatly reduces the risk of contracts being lost, overlooked, and accessed by the wrong individuals. It will also allow you to access any document at anytime from anywhere on any device, and that ubiquity is a key component and driver for any organization’s digital transformation.
Another reason to digitize your contracts is so you can easily make use of the valuable data contained in them. Having the ability to capture, analyze, and report on data such as expiration dates, contract amounts, types of clauses used, and contacts will allow you to make much more informed business decisions. After all, digital transformation is all about improving your business processes and developing new business models.
As you begin the process of digitizing and centralizing your contracts – whether they are paper or already in electronic form – it’s’ important that your contract management system employs optical character recognition (OCR) technology. OCR automatically scans the content of your documents as you add them to the system regardless of their format. This ensures that all your contract data is easily found in the results of any search you perform, reports you run, or dashboards you create.
Takeaway
Centralizing all your contracts into a secure, electronic repository is the best and most logical starting point to achieving legal digitization. It may seem like a daunting task, but with help of contract management software, it’s not.
Cloud-based contract management software can be very easy and cost-effective to implement. You can start with a solution that meets the needs of your organization today. Then, as your requirements grow, you can add additional capabilities and user licenses.
Once you’ve built this foundation you can begin to embrace all the other wonderful features of contract management software that allow you to further execute your digital transformation strategy and put smiles on the faces of both your CIO and CEO.
In an article on the company’s website, Xakia said t
When accounting for size of the legal department, Xakia says, it’s clear that it’s smaller teams that are winging it without a plan:
Greg Palm is retiring as Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s co-general counsel, the company’s CEO wrote in a memo to staff Wednesday, according to Bloomberg.
Bloomberg’s Sridhar Natarajan and Tom Metcalf describe where Palm’s income ranks among corporate lawyers in the United States:
“For his role at the forefront of Goldman Sachs’s toughest battles, Palm has been rewarded generously by his employer. He’s pulled in about $500 million, including about $180 million worth of Goldman shares, as well as dividends, distributions from firm-managed funds and proceeds from stock sales, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That ranks him among America’s wealthiest corporate lawyers and the richest people working within any global investment bank, underlining his persistent importance to Goldman over 26 years.”
As an in-house counsel — the individual tasked with mitigating risk for your employer — sometimes you have to make a decision much hastier than you might normally be comfortable with doing so, writes Stephen R. Williams in a column for Above the Law.
Williams, who works in-house with a multi-facility hospital network, tells about a crisis that dropped into his lap late on the Friday before the week of Christmas. It involved a report from an employee who said one of their coworkers made what was perceived to be a comment reflecting a suicidal thought.
His column tells how he dealt with the situation, even though the colleagues who usually handle such cases were unavailable because of the holiday season.
Prospective law students who want to become corporate general counsel should look for law schools located in major metropolitan areas with an abundance of corporate headquarters and a plethora of in-house legal externship and internship options, advises the author of “The Corporate Counsel Survival Guide.”
According to U.S. News & World Report, William Kruse also believes that modern corporate lawyers are often expected to negotiate international deals and resolve international disputes, so these attorneys must understand how U.S. law varies from the laws in other nations.
He says transactional attorney jobs are often suitable for recent J.D. recipients, particularly if they had a business career before attending law school. However, Kruse says he would not hire someone straight out of law school as a corporate litigator, writes. U.S. News reporter Ilana Kowarski.
Kelly Rentzel had to overcome some big barriers to become general counsel at Dallas-based Texas Capital Bank. Along the way she endured a monthlong stay in a psychiatric ward, the rigors of law school, and a suicide attempt.
In a profile in the Houston Chronicle, reporter Natalie Posgate of The Texas Lawbook, writes:
“To say Rentzel has overcome barriers in her life – and has landed on the other side stronger every time – is an understatement. Recently, she’s overcome a different kind of barrier: talking about her condition publicly.
She landed her job just months after the suicide attempt and became the bank’s first in-house lawyer and then built the legal department from scratch.
Read the Houston Chronicle article.
Hanzo, a developer of dynamic web archiving technology for compliance and e-discovery professionals, announced a lineup of industry experts presenting in the webinar “How to Win Using Native Format to Capture Social Media Data,” on Dec. 19, 2018.
The event will include a discussion about the importance of social media to business communications and the ensuing challenges it presents for e-discovery and compliance in the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The webinar also will share strategic insights and best practices for defensible social media collection and real-world stories from the field.
In a release, the company said social media is a valuable way to communicate with customers, but many heavily regulated financial firms shy away from its use, fearing that regulatory compliance will be too difficult. Organizations can also find social media to be critical in e-discovery because it offers a rare window into people’s daily thoughts and activities, even after those people have become embroiled in litigation.
Recent data privacy and security discussions have impacted the use of APIs for social media collections. In this webinar industry experts from legal to corporate will share their experiences with how organizations use and deal with social media in the course of their business. They’ll discuss the risk and challenges surrounding compliance and eDiscovery collections, and explore what is driving organizations toward superior native-format collections.
Speakers will be:
REGISTER
How to Win Using Native Format to Capture Social Media Data
https://www.hanzo.co/native-format-capture-social-media-webinar
Date: Wednesday, December 19, 2018
Time: 1:30 pm ET
Cost: Free
Tesla announced on Friday that General Counsel Todd Maron is leaving the electric vehicle maker, the second high-ranking attorney to do so this quarter.
CNBC reports that the move comes a month after Phil Rothenberg left his post as Tesla’s vice president of legal to become general counsel at Sonder, a hospitality start-up.
CNBC’s Lora Kolodny reports:
“The electric car company said it plans to replace Maron with seasoned Beltway trial lawyer Dane Butswinkas, a chairman at Williams & Connolly, who was also a Co-Chair in the firm’s Commercial Litigation, Financial Services and Banking Groups.”
Corporate counsel report a decrease in the number of lawsuits against their companies over the last year, but they face more regulatory proceedings and arbitrations in navigating increased cyber risk, data protection and tax issues.
Norton Rose Fulbright’s 2018 Litigation Trends Annual Survey polled 365 senior corporate counsel representing US-based organizations on disputes-related issues and concerns.
Two thirds of respondents report feeling more exposed in 2018 to cybersecurity and data protection disputes. The survey also found that the growing international nature of many business operations has caused a spike in conflicts related to countries’ differing discovery and data protection laws and regulations.
Bloomberg Law is reporting that corporate law departments are spending more, but less of that that money is landing in Big Law coffers, according to a new survey.
Altman Weil’s 19th Annual Chief Legal Officer survey revealed that most companies increased their spending between 2017 and 2018. But about a third of legal officers shifted work to lower-priced alternatives, the data indicated.
Survey participants said they received quality work and service at considerable reductions in cost with shifts to smaller firm, reports Bloomberg’s Elizabeth Olson.
Read the Bloomberg Law article.
Facebook general counsel Colin Stretch, who announced in July that he was leaving the company at the end of the year, has changed his mind, reports Recode.
Facebook is still dealing with legal and political crises, including multiple federal investigations into Facebook’s data and privacy practices that started earlier this year, writes Recode reporter Kurt Wagner.
Stretch was named in a I story as one of the few Facebook executives who knew that Russian hackers were using the service ahead of the election well before it was announced publicly — or even presented to Facebook’s board of directors. It’s unclear whether or not Stretch’s decision to stay had anything to do with that report, according to Wagner.