Features June 2019

It’s rare for a young company’s fourth hire to be its own in-house attorney. Especially so for a start-up, New York City-based Kindur only having commenced operations in late 2017. But the principals weren’t new to this game; collectively they had managed $120 billion over the course of a half-century at previous stops that included […]

There has been just too much growth for Angela Tyczkowski to personally quarterback all acquisition matters in her capacity as general counsel for Marco Technologies. More than 20 since she accepted the challenge of starting an in-house legal department for the St. Cloud, Minnesota-based business-to-business technology provider in 2012. The pace has only picked up, […]

The story started out on a quiet southern afternoon, Antigone Davoulas says, when three women met up at a local Proposition 7 campaign event in Arkansas to collaborate over crawfish. But they weren’t swapping recipes, the general counsel at Shake Collaboration remembers. They were talking about cannabis and hemp—even though it wasn’t “that” kind of […]

Bert Kaminski had a choice to make. Not quite as nerve-racking as leaving private practice for the dot-com bubble before it burst, but close enough to cause a few sleepless nights: remain as chief commercial counsel at GE Digital, or jump ship to head the legal operations for a recently spun-off subsidiary. Once again, Kaminski […]

Back in March, while attending the 2019 DFW Auto Show in Dallas, Carolyn Shellman kept noticing clusters of onlookers gathered around a few specific cars. Each time she wove her way through the crowd to see what all the fuss was about, the object of attention was the same. Not a souped-up Ferrari or the […]

If your employer cracked the top five of “Inc.” magazine’s list of the 500 fastest-growing private companies in America, chances are your first thought would be to run straight for the “emergency” champagne bottle inside the break room refrigerator. Charlotte Scaglione’s mind went somewhere a bit different: We’re going to need more contract templates. “The […]

There was the fired employee who stole intellectual property, and then used the threat of litigation to try to blackmail the company (spoiler alert: it didn’t work). A few years later, there was the battlefield promotion when the boss up and quit, leaving behind an incomplete budget and a quarter to close. Or that time […]

When Dina Segal’s son was three and wondering why his mother wasn’t home one particular day, he approached his father with the question: “Why does mommy work all the time?” Segal’s husband responded: “Mommy goes to work because she helps people solve problems; she helps make the world a better place.” Those words stuck with […]

Asked to elaborate on what it means for a company to have an “entrepreneurial spirit”—a term he frequently uses to describe his current employer’s overall philosophy and approach—Doug Balyeat could’ve leaned on any number of tired clichés: thinking outside the box or dreaming the impossible. You know the lines. Instead, he takes a moment to […]

The ringing of the Nasdaq bell was preceded by a phone call to Establishment Labs by Costa Rican President Carlos Alvarado Quesada last July 18. For this was a landmark moment; the Costa Rican company qualified for an initial public offering on an American stock exchange, its shares going for $26.60 and since holding fairly […]