Sara Marston, general counsel of Refinery29, the fastest-growing independent fashion and style website in the United States, faces these questions daily and loves every minute of it.
Lauri Shanahan, who went from being the chief legal and administrative officer of a multinational corporation (Gap Inc.), to sitting on the board of directors of three companies, insists that a key to her success has been to step back and reflect more often.
Some attorneys have hoarder tendencies. They hold on to outdated contract writing practices long after these practices no longer meet their original function or need.
Sometime between entering law school and taking the bar exam, many attorneys decide that to affect change and help serve the interests of justice they must join a non-profit organization or provide pro bono services.
While many lawyers may be interested in joining a board of directors of a for-profit public or private company, reaching this goal can entail a degree of complexity that even the Byzantine Emperors would have envied. Consequently many lawyers are puzzled by the process and give up well before they even begin. Likewise, companies and many current board members do not often project a lot of enthusiasm when it comes to adding lawyers to the board.
Jan Kang, vice president and general counsel for AOptix Technologies, knows a thing or two about Moore's Law. While Moore's law remains a standby in computing, when it comes to social networking, Kang has blown the traditional growth prediction out of the water.
Michelle Banks of Gap Inc. — the American multinational clothing and accessories retailer behind brand names Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy, Athleta and Intermix, with more than 140,000 employees and over 3,700 company-operated and franchise stores worldwide — cares about women.
“The risk of trying new technology tools available to in-house lawyers is not as high as the risk of being left behind,” says Mike Haven, senior operations and litigation counsel at NetApp, a Fortune 500 data management and storage company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California.
Someone once described a traditional legal career as a predictable, well-known path that generations of lawyers take. A deviation from it is frowned upon and can be legal career suicide. Thus, many lawyers miss all the scenic routes!
Even though they facilitate their long voyages as private companies, flourishing private secondary offerings are not always an unmitigated good for pre-IPO companies. In particular, without careful management at the company level, employee trading of private company shares can have a disastrous impact on issues like preserving confidential information or valuing options, and can be a distraction within the organization.
We recently caught up with Stephanie Adamson King who serves as general counsel at AdRoll, which is an ad technology company best known as a leader in retargeting products across platforms and devices for Facebook, Twitter, Apple iAd, and millions of other websites.
I recently caught up with Brian Cabrera who serves as senior vice president and general counsel at NVIDIA Corporation, a market leader in visual computing.
