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Negotiation skills are critical in a multitude of personal and professional relationships, and many lawyers—both new and seasoned—seek the necessary skills to achieve the desired outcome while creating synergy and fostering good, long-term relationships. This session offered strategies to best obtain value and profitability in your negotiations, identify and neutralize difficult negotiators and their tactics, tailor your negotiation style to suit different settings, examine practical ethical issues lawyers face in negotiation, and recognize and address common pitfalls and problems typically encountered in negotiations.

Law departments continue to face unique challenges resulting from Sarbanes-Oxley. As new regulations are introduced, the list of requirements that businesses must satisfy becomes more complex and exhaustive. Simultaneously, law departments face budget constraints, competitive pressures requiring rapid-fire responses, and the risks created by internal “silos.” Today, a law department’s structure directly impacts the ability of supervising attorneys to manage operations and deliver quality client service. This interactive workshop addressed the challenges faced by in-house counsel and shared best practices for successfully managing a law department.

Outsourcing of legal services to non-US entities is a significant trend. Corporate counsel must understand how this will affect their role and services to their clients and be prepared to address questions raised by senior management as this practice becomes more widespread. Topics covered included outsourcing legal services to non-US entities, relevant ethical considerations, practical considerations such as monitoring and controlling quality, types of matters that can or even should be outsourced to non-US counsel, and privilege and confidentiality issues.

Increasingly, law departments are responsible for more than just practicing law — they are also responsible for efficient and fiscally responsible operations. Managing costs, reducing risk, and improving productivity are all priorities for corporate counsel because law departments are being evaluated against the same standards as other departments within their companies. To meet this challenge, law departments need new tools for measuring value and results. This session shared best practices on using metrics to manage or control costs, evaluate outside counsel performance, increase efficiencies, and communicate the value of the law department to company management.

Discussion will focus on the rules of the road during negotiations and highlight permissible conduct, impermissible conduct and the gray area in between. There are a surprising number of instances of lawyers behaving badly and being punished for conduct that many counsel believe passes muster. This program is suited for corporate and regulatory lawyers, as well as litigators.

As sports and entertainment based marketing grows, many companies have opted to engage athletes, entertainers, teams and leagues. This program will cover the basics of sponsorship agreements from both the team/talent side and the sponsor perspective. Special consideration will be paid to points such as league subservience, exclusivities, indemnity, morals clauses and labor stoppages. This program will cater to the novice lawyer to an experienced contractual negotiator in both the for-profit and nonprofit arenas.

This program will inform in-house counsel about issues relating to “cloud computing,” including new media technology. The panel will provide insight into managing technology and business risks, including international data privacy issues. A checklist for review of Cloud solutions leading to a strategy for negotiations will be provided.

This presentation covers EU and the data privacy and security movement, as well as it's history, and the comparison between the EU and the APEC.

This session will discuss monitoring and protecting intellectual property assets around the globe. Learn the risks and challenges other companies are facing, and how they are combating IP infringement. The topics addressed will include: identifying and protecting against risks to your brand; strategies for monitoring your brand name; tackling domain squatters and combating other brand abuse; developing strategies for protecting your brand on a global scale; and how counterfeit goods and piracy impact brands and the best practices for targeting suppliers of counterfeit goods.

Raising capital in private transactions is big business, for new, small and large companies alike. If this hasn’t been your practice are before and is now, join us at this session to explore with experienced practitioners the basic legal and regulatory framework for raising capital privately – covering the Securities Act exemption and Regulation D and changes to that framework made by the Dodd-Frank Act. We’ll also introduce you to the key concepts and jargon (e.g., bad boy investors) you’ll need to get through a capital raising with comfort. The session will cover finding (soliciting) investors, what the offering materials need to cover and look like, state blue sky (another piece of jargon we’ll cover), restricted stock and who the regulators are.

Take an in-depth look at executive compensation disclosure in this session. The focus will be on completing the Summary Compensation Tables and other Reg S-K Item 402 tables, preparing the Compensation Disclosure & Analysis (CD&A) for the Proxy Statement and describing – in text, not tables – employment agreements and golden parachutes. We’ll cover tough questions on what data to report and how to report it, and we’ll cover – particularly for the CD&A – not just the requirements, but the process for putting together great disclosure. The session presupposes a working knowledge of proxy and 10-K requirements for reporting companies.

This material comes from a program for those with established international practices, as companies need to constantly evaluate in a tight market if resources are being properly deployed.

A review of the year’s IP legal developments including patent, trademark and copyright primarily.

Movie lawyers lead tough lives, particularly corporate lawyers. From the 1976 film Network to the 2007 film Michael Clayton, the fantastic situations of our big screen counterparts offer real world lessons. Using short film clips of ethically challenged movie lawyers to illustrate the requirements of the rules of professional responsibility, Hollywood's portrayal of corporate counsel enables us to demonstrate practical requirements of the rules of ethics. By drawing on familiar movies, this session enhances audience interaction and provides very tangible examples of the rules in action. From negotiation ethics to privilege, dealing with employees to document retention, audience participants will be encouraged to opine regarding their views of the movie lawyer behavior, and the panel of both in-house and outside counsel will draw from the film examples to present other hypotheticals and examples that will keep the program grounded in real world application to the practicing lawyer.

Politics and government regulation affect every aspect of business profitability and success, often in critical ways. Corporate legal counsel can, and do, advocate successfully in legislatures, administrative agencies, and courts, at federal, state, and local levels. However, corporate counsel must comply with their professional and ethical obligations in doing so. Learn how to manage the corporation’s advocacy efforts, including lobbyists, election advertisements and political contributions, without running afoul of the law or the highest ethical standards.

A series of tips for general counsel on how to manage liability at a sports/entertainment facility.

An overview of cloud computing, including a discussion of the pros and cons of cloud computing, privacy considerations, and other legal issues.

An overview of the process of licensing music, videos, and photos. Includes a discussion of basic copyright law, the Fair Use Doctrine, and other intellectual property issues.

Perhaps no area of law varies as greatly in the global context as employment law. In some jurisdictions, laws can comparatively conflict and may appear largely unintuitive to an outsider. How can global company employment policies be written at a high enough level to apply across all regions, yet include a reasonable level of specificity to allow for regional variances in practice? Furthermore, how can global policies encompass the ever-growing mobile and outsourced workforce to ensure fair, consistent and legally-enforceable practice?

Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) have been on the top of the agenda for management and in-house counsel during the last years and trade compliance may or may not be getting the attention merited by the current complexities of this area of law. This will certainly have an implication on the current trade compliance landscape and how in-house counsel should respond to it. This session will bring more clarity to the current status and provide concrete recommendations for your daily operations.

Examine today's most meaningful metrics and acquire the tools to determine which metrics matter most for you and your organization.

With its rapidly growing economy and expanding middle class, India has become an increasingly attractive market in which to invest and do business. While there has been a liberalization of the Indian economy, regulatory constraints and other challenges remain. Learn about the key bureaucratic, regulatory and legal considerations of making investments, creating joint ventures and distributing products in India, including protecting technology transfers to India and selecting suitable dispute resolution mechanisms.

Discover what happens behind closed doors during settlement negotiations with the SEC. Hypothetical scenarios and role-playing will facilitate a model face-to-face “negotiation” with the SEC, providing insight into negotiating the terms and the language of a settlement order, including penalties, charges, mitigation language, and whether employees are named as defendants or respondents.

Presented at ACCA’s Annual Meeting 2000; Program - International Distribution from A-Z

Handout for ACC Chicago and Mayer Brown webinar, Negotiating Technology Deals, on May 24, 2023.

Presented at ACC’s Annual Meeting 2000; Program - Internal Marketing of Legal Services for Insurance Staff Counsel

Presented at ACCA’s Annual Meeting 2000; Program - Copyright Protection in Cyberspace: IP on the ’Net

Presented at ACCA’s Annual Meeting 2000; Program - Conducting Business Online - What General Counsel Need to Know