Features December 2018

Jasmani Francis has never been one to fall into a routine or slip neatly into a stereotype. A native of inner-city Miami, Florida and an Illinois transplant, he is a lawyer, an entrepreneur, a sports memorabilia appraiser, a student of history and philosophy, a writer. Certainly he’s a reader. Recently, he’s picked up Frederic Bastiat’s […]

On his first day as a market analyst for Chemical Bank, during an intensive management training program, Marc Nichols received the most important advice of his then-young career: Make every decision as if it’ll be on the front page of the New York Times, and the person you respect the most is reading it. Twenty-five […]

When he first arrived at Entrata’s cramped corporate headquarters, then located on the dimly lit second floor of a credit union in Salt Lake City’s outskirts, Jared Hunsaker—the company’s sixtieth hire—had to share his cubicle with another coworker. Today, the seasoned general counsel is one of more than 1,600 employees. Meanwhile, the company’s revenue has […]

When Robynn Van Patten decided to take a self-imposed sabbatical and move her family to France, following a succession of heartbreaking losses and years of taxing work, the veteran general counsel did something she’d never done before: she kept the calendar open. Childrearing by day, wine and writing by night, Van Patten tried to put […]

Time was when John Geschke would apply his mix of legal and business acumen at a couple of prestigious firms in Palo Alto, California, structuring complex deals for blue-chip clients, but never really knowing the long-term impact of his services. Once the deal was sealed, there’d be another one pending. For Geschke, that’s how it […]

In the spring of 2004, as he prepared for trial representing the federal government in a drug-trafficking case—one he knew “wouldn’t make a dent” in the volume of illegal drugs coming into the U.S.—Dickens Mathieu took a break from the wiretap transcripts to check his email. There, near the top of his inbox, one subject […]

Like the literal universe, the cosmos of intellectual property is expanding, only there’s still plenty of room for collision as companies jockey to acquire, manage and protect intellectual property. So it pays to get guidance both on a legal and science front. That’s a rare two-fer, but for the past three years a slew of […]

It’s a question he’s often asked, and one that Joel Stern seems to enjoy every time it’s posed—how he, a 60-year-old, heterosexual white man—was selected in 2014 as chief executive officer of NAMWOLF, the National Association of Minority and Women Owned Law Firms. “You’ve just called out the elephant in the room,” Stern says with […]

Sometimes the best runs start with a bad hand. It was 2005, and Michael Magazzu had just earned his J.D. from Widener University. A pair of clerkships already under his belt—the first with a county prosecutor, the second with a public defender—the 25-year-old set his sights on a more prestigious gig working for a criminal […]

There’s a reality that Joshua Johnson can’t help but note. Business leaders in numerous industries, whether they advocated or opposed the steel and aluminum tariffs that went into effect this past summer, now have an additional task. They must stay up to date with the latest trade developments in order to successfully navigate a changing […]