San Francisco Bay Area
Seasoned attorney with extensive experience advising clients on a wide range of business law matters. Understands the business-oriented role of a lawyer and the importance of providing pragmatic and efficient solutions that strike an appropriate balance between business concerns and risk management. Areas of expertise include commercial law, IP licensing, corporate governance, privacy law, international law, intellectual property, mergers & acquisitions (M&A), management, corporate law, contract negotiation, open-source software licensing, artificial intelligence (AI) and data lakes, software product counseling, strategic procurement and sourcing, policy and procedure drafting and administration, channel and technology partner programs, SaaS, data, and on-prem software licensing, marketing law compliance and best practices, app marketplaces and app forges, template (form) and playbook creation, patent mining and prosecution, navigating large and sophisticated sourcing/procurement departments and processes both as a seller, buyer, and partner, and ’33 and ’34 Act filings.
Freshworks is a cloud-based software company that provides customer engagement and support solutions for businesses. Their offerings help companies manage their customer interactions, support tickets, and overall customer and employee relationships across Sales, Marketing, Support and IT and Business teams. I served as principal legal counsel to the Product, Engineering, and Marketing departments. Areas of responsibility included: • Artificial Intelligence: Draft and administer policies and procedures designed to promote data governance around generative AI and traditional machine learning-based product features. Provide ongoing legal counsel on issues inherent in the deployment of artificial intelligence and cloud-based data lakes in the SaaS space, including Privacy-by-Design, the Data Minimization Principle, data localization, and data retention. • Product Counseling: Design and implement workflows and procedures to address legal considerations attendant to new product and feature rollouts, pricing and packaging change management, betas, trials, and freemium offerings, product documentation, artificial intelligence features, and the company’s websites. • Privacy: Draft and administer policies and procedures designed to foster compliance with privacy laws on a global scale with a specific focus on software engineering, data governance, product design, and product marketing. • Compliance: Provide training and legal counsel in the areas of product design, product documentation, and product marketing to ensure ongoing compliance with applicable laws, regulations, and standards, such as U.S. export control laws, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, GDPR, AI laws, email and other marketing laws, as well as contractual duties to customers, partners, and vendors. • Transactional: Draft and update contract templates and train and serve as an escalation point to commercial attorneys.
• Served as lead counsel for the design, implementation, and launch of both Tanium’s global channel partner program as well as Tanium’s technology partner program, including acting as the principal drafter of an ecosystem of contract templates, policies, and procedures to support the launch and ongoing administration of these programs. • Served as the principal drafter of numerous new contract templates and model provisions, including those supporting the launch of Tanium’s first software-as-a-service product. • Drafted and negotiated complex strategic partnership agreements that facilitated a variety of collaborative technical integrations and go-to-market strategies. • Supported department associates by developing protocols and supervising the review and negotiation of vendor agreements. • Led legal support for the Real Estate & Facilities department. • Developed playbooks, templates, workflows, and other internal resources to streamline existing processes, empower the business, and reduce resource strain on the legal department. • Managed department attorney and supervised outside counsel on matters related to the foregoing.
Investment Technology Group, Inc. (NYSE: ITG) was a U.S.–based multinational broker-dealer and fintech firm known as an early founder and operator of a dark pool, POSIT, a software and data licensor (mostly known for its execution management system, Triton), and a pioneer in the field of electronic trading and trading algorithms. The company’s clients were exclusively made up of large asset managers, hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds, and pension funds. ITG was acquired by Virtu Financial (NYSE: VIRT) in 2018. • Administered ITG’s IP portfolio, which included coordinating patent prosecution with outside counsel, managing the company’s trademark portfolio in conjunction with the head of marketing, supporting product and engineering teams by providing guidance on IP issues inherent in evolving products and features, providing IP support on commercial transactions, and evaluating patent purchase opportunities. • Advised engineering, IT, data security, business development, marketing, and other teams on a full range of issues related to product development and commercialization, including compliance with US and international laws on intellectual property, open source licensing, privacy, and data security. • Drafted, updated, and administered a wide variety of forms of agreement, legal department processes, and company policies, including ITG’s global, GDPR-compliant privacy policy, Open Source Software policy, and Cloud Computing policy. • Managed department attorney responsible for commercial negotiations, drafting, and the contract management system.