Folio is reporting that American Media, Inc., publisher of The National Enquirer, Us Weekly, and several other celebrity and fitness titles, has appointed a new top lawyer after parting ways with Cameron Stracher, who had served for nearly 12 years as the company’s general counsel, media.

Jon P. Fine will take on the newly created role of deputy general counsel, media on AMI’s legal team and will report directly to executive VP and chief legal officer, Eric Klee, according to reporter Kayleigh Barber.

The New York Post reported there was a stormy encounter at lunch last week between Stracher, a media and libel law specialist, and David Pecker, the company’s embattled CEO. “When they got back from lunch at Cipriani Wall Street, Stracher began clearing out his desk,” according to Post reporter Keith J. Kelly.

A U.S. attorney in New York is looking into a possible payoff Pecker is alleged to have made to a former Playmate who was alleged to have had an affair with Donald Trump. The inquiry will see if the payoff right before the 2016 presidential election constituted an illegal campaign contribution by AMI.

Read the Folio article.

Bloomberg is reporting that an experienced securities lawyer has left Tesla Inc. just as the company needs one under its fraud settlement with U.S. regulators.

Phil Rothenberg, a vice president in Tesla’s legal department who joined the company in 2011, became general counsel at Sonder, a hospitality startup, on Nov. 5, writes Bloomberg reporter Dana Hull.

Before joining Tesla, Rothenberg was an attorney-adviser for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and has extensive securities law experience.

Read the Bloomberg article.

The Broward Health board fired its general counsel Lynn Barrett as the Florida taxpayer-supported health system continues to struggle after a series of state and federal investigations related to alleged overspending, kickbacks and open-government law violations, reports Modern Healthcare.

“Broward Health doctors alleged during Wednesday’s board meeting that Barrett helped cultivate a hostile culture at the South Florida health system, which led to a ‘mass exodus’ of doctors that crippled the organization,” explains reporter Alex Kacik.

Barrett’s dismissal comes amid a controversy over an independent review process led by law firm Baker Donelson concerning a $69.5 million healthcare fraud settlement agreement reached in 2015.

Read the Modern Healthcare article.

Pac-12 general counsel Woodie Dixon interfered with an official review of a foul in a game between USC and Washington State, resulting in the NCAA conference deciding to change its policy on non-trained officials weighing in on such reviews.

CBS Sports reports that Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott addressed the incident in which Dixon interfered with a targeting review during the game in September.

Tom Fornelli writes that reports indicate that Dixon, who is not a formally trained official, called into the Pac-12 replay booth and said he didn’t think a targeting penalty applied to the play. In the official game report, Gary McNanna, who was the replay official in the booth for the game, wrote that “a third party did not agree so the targeting was removed.”

Read the CBS Sports article.

Bloomberg is reporting that Gerson Zweifach, the lawyer who guided billionaire Rupert Murdoch and his family through the British phone-hacking scandal, will step down as general counsel of 21st Century Fox Inc. once the media company completes its $71 billion asset sale to Walt Disney Co.

Zweifach, who has worked Murdoch since since 2012, will return to Williams & Connolly after the deal closes in the first half of 2019, Fox said in a statement Thursday.

“Zweifach saw the company through several challenges, including a sex-harassment scandal at Fox News, an unsuccessful bid for Time Warner Inc. and now the company’s breakup in a sale to Disney,” writes reporter Anousha Sakoui.

Read the Bloomberg article.

Brynly Llyr, general counsel of Ripple, one of the world’s leading cryptocurrency companies, has left the payment and remittance network, reports Quartz’s Private Key newsletter.

Quartz reporter Matthew De Silva explains: “Ripple is gearing up for a class-action battle about whether its XRP cryptocurrency is a security or not, and has bolstered its legal team by retaining heavyweights like former US Securities and Exchange Commission chair Mary Jo White and the regulator’s former director of enforcement, Andrew Ceresney. Although Llyr is an experienced attorney with impressive credentials, she doesn’t have the same sway as some of these other legal advisors. Still, the turnover on Ripple’s in-house legal team comes at an awkward time, given the impending case.”

Read the Quartz article.

As budget season approaches, a post on the Xakia website takes a look at the financial side of corporate legal operations – from alternative fee arrangements to special considerations for smaller departments.

The post offers some benchmarks to help gauge how a department’s budget compares with others. While every team and company is different, benchmarks can help establish context – or give you fodder to ask for a budget increase, the company says.

Headings include: Legal Budget as a Percentage of Revenue, Legal Budget by Department Size, Legal Budget by Location, Legal Budget by Industry, and Why Budget Matters.

Read the article.

Houston-based energy giant ConocoPhillips is expected to name Baker Botts corporate transactional partner Kelly Brunetti Rose of Houston as its new general counsel, according to a report in The Houston Chronicle.

The Texas Lawbook, via the Chronicle, reports that multiple legal industry sources confirm that Rose, who has represented ConocoPhillips and several other major oil and gas companies in dozens of billion-dollar mergers, acquisitions, joint ventures and securities offerings, will replace retiring ConocoPhillips general counsel Janet Langford Carrig.

“Rose has led some of the largest oil and gas M&A deals in Texas over the past two decades. She has represented Halliburton, Shell Oil Company, Linn Energy and Waste Management in an assortment of large transactions,” writes Mark Curriden of the Texas Lawbook.

Read the Chronicle article.

On its face, ROI seems pretty straightforward – a basic math equation that determines the ratio between an investment’s profit and its cost. But with legal technology, this can get a little nebulous: Your department deals in time, not in widgets, according to a blog post on the website of Xakia.

“Perhaps that’s why 74 percent of law firms in the U.K. don’t even try to calculate the ROI of their legal technology projects, according to a March 2018 report by Lexis Nexis,” Xakia said in the post. “While no similar statistic was available for corporate legal departments, we’d make the educated guess that the majority aren’t monitoring their legal tech return – despite the fact that, as a recent Association of Legal Administration presentation put it, ‘ROI is the only technology acronym that matters.’

“Indeed, ROI is the language of the C-suite, and it’s imperative for in-house lawyers to show fluency. (Recall that one-third of CEOs and directors rank “controlling legal spend” as a top-three priority for law department performance.) You need to know your ROI to demonstrate that you are a good steward of company resources, to test and validate your decision-making, and to inform future projects in your legal technology roadmap.”

Read the article.

ContractWorks has published a new guide designed to show how to reassign appropriate tasks and simplify workflows by tapping into the skills and experience of non-legal staff in ways that will optimize the legal department’s time without introducing additional risk or oversight.

“A Guide to Delegating Legal Contract Responsibility” is available at ContractWorks’ website at no charge.

“Delegating contract management activities to your non-lawyer professionals has a variety of advantages, but it needs to be planned deliberately and strategically,” the company says on its website. “Make sure that you understand the strengths of the different personnel on your roster, and collaborate with the other areas of your business to make sure that everyone is committed to this new process change.”

The guide discusses:

• How Delegating Tasks Will Benefit Your Entire Team
• Ways to Maintain Control Without and Mitigate Risks
• Best Methods for Building Dedicated Teams
• How to Assign Ownership to Individual Business Units

Download the guide.

In-house counsel responses to Xakia’s Legal Operations Health Check provide a quantitative look at the real state of legal operations in departments of all sizes, the company says on its website.

The responses show that legal departments are looking for matter management tools, litigation management and e-discovery tools, intellectual property management, and contract automation tools.

As for pain points, large departments “voiced discontent with their existing document management and knowledge management tools; 43 percent said their current systems don’t meet their needs, and another 14 percent admitted to not using these tools well. Only 14 percent said their department used document management and knowledge management tools ‘moderately well’ or better. (Perhaps this is solace for the 63 percent of small departments that said they do not have any document management system.)”

Read the report.

Former Wynn Resorts Ltd. executive vice president and general counsel Kim Sinatra will receive a $1.8 million cash settlement as she leaves the company, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

A Securities and Exchange Commission filing included a copy of the five-page settlement agreement as well as a 26-page employment agreement between the company and Sinatra’s successor, Ellen Whittemore, writes Richard N. Velotta.

“Whittemore, a gaming attorney with 30 years’ experience and a former shareholder in the Las Vegas law office of Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, will be paid $600,000 a year, plus benefits,” according to Velotta.

Read the Review-Journal article.

Above the Law reports that a new ranking of compensation of general counsel shows that each of the GCs in the top 10 made more than $3 million in 2017.

Eric Grossman of Morgan Stanley tops the list with compensation last year of nearly $7 million.

Other companies in the top 10 in GC pay include American Express Co., Twenty-First Century Fox, Walt Disney, Leucadia, CBS, Halliburton, Microsoft, HRG Group and Netflix.

Corporate Counsel created the ranking, which considered base salary, cash bonus, and nonequity incentives.

Read the Above the Law article.

CNBC is reporting that Google has promoted its general counsel and long-time employee Kent Walker to senior vice president of global affairs.

In his new role, Kent Walker will  oversee Google’s policy, legal, trust and safety, and corporate philanthropy teams.

“In this more public-facing position, his role will be similar to how former CEO Eric Schmidt often represented Google’s interests to governments, before he stepped down from his executive chairman role last December,” explains reporter Jillian D’Onfro. “It’s also similar to the role Brad Smith plays for Microsoft.”

Read the CNBC article.

Colin Stretch, Facebook’s top lawyer and the man who led Facebook’s investigation into Russian election interference efforts following the 2016 U.S. presidential election, is leaving the company at the end of the year, according to a Recode report.

Stretch posted on Tuesday that he’s planning to leave the company but will stay on until the end of the year to help find his replacement, writes reporter Kurt Wagner.

Wagner adds:

Stretch’s departure comes during a stressful time for Facebook’s legal team. Not only is the company still grappling with the controversial role it played in the 2016 U.S. election — Russia used to platform to try and divide U.S. voters with inflammatory and inaccurate posts — but it’s also gearing up for the 2018 midterms. Company executives have been open in saying that they expect foreign governments might try again to sway voters.

Read the Record article.

The former general counsel of Lionsgate Entertainment left the company amid allegations of sexual misconduct and abuse, reports Variety, citing a story in The Wall Street Journal.

“Wayne Levin resigned from the company in November of last year,” writes Gene Maddaus. “A former subordinate, Wendy Jaffe, told the Journal that Levin mistreated her for more than a decade, including non-consensual sexual conduct in 2002 and 2003. Jaffe left the company in 2016, and received a $2.5 million settlement.”

Jaffe said Lionsgate had violated a non-disclosure agreement, giving her the opportunity to speak about her experiences.

Jaffe was executive vice president of legal affairs and reported to Levin during her tenure.

Read the Variety article.

The former general counsel for the Oklahoma State Department of Health is accused of falsifying death threats against herself and has been charged in Oklahoma County district court, according to KWTV News 9 in Oklahoma City.

Julia Marie Ezell faces three counts of using a computer to send herself death threats and then falsely report a made-up crime. Ezell resigned as health department general counsel on Friday.

State officials said the emails were meant to look like they were coming from angry medical marijuana supporters. The health department recently adopted rules for the implementation of medical marijuana across the state.

Read the KWTV News 9 article.

Richard Thigpen has been fired after more than two decades as general counsel of the Carolina Panthers, Thigpen confirmed to The Charlotte Observer.

Thigpen is the second high-profile Panthers executive to leave the team since hedge fund manager David Tepper bought the Panthers for $2.275 billion.

“Their departures come on the heels of the conclusion of an investigation of former team owner Jerry Richardson, who was fined $2.75 million for multiple instances of sexual and racial misconduct in the workplace.,” according to reporters Katherine Peralta and Joseph Person.

Read the Observer article.

Bloomberg is reporting that Wynn Resorts Ltd., whose founder stepped down earlier this year over allegations of sexual harassment, said General Counsel Kim Sinatra left her position, marking another high-profile change at the casino company.

Reporters Rob Golum and Scott Moritz write: “Her departure follows other top-level moves at the Las Vegas-based company since the resignation of Chief Executive Officer Steve Wynn in February. Six board members announced they were leaving; three new ones were added, all of them women. Meanwhile, the new CEO, Matt Maddox, has been trying to distance the company from the regime of his predecessor, even going so far as to drop the Wynn name from the new casino the company is building near Boston.”

Sinatra has been general counsel at Wynn since 2004.

Read the Bloomberg article.

The playbook for moving between in-house and Biglaw is well known and pretty straightforward, points out Above the Law.

“But if you are working in-house and want to move to an in-house role in another company, well, the playbook is not as clear and the path is a little more obscure. Even though you may be more marketable given your previous in-house experience, the application process can be a challenge,” writes columnist Stephen R. Williams, in-house counsel with a multi-facility hospital network.

He offers a sampling of some of the most common interview questions and some possible honest answers, which could run afoul of attorney-client privilege.

Read the Above the Law column.