MoForever Alumni News - Winter 2019

5 | MoForever Winter 2019 What are your primary responsibilities at Jazz? Formally, I’m responsible for litigation and government affairs. A part of that is managing the kind of intellectual property and commercial litigation I used to handle at MoFo. But over time my job has really evolved into areas that are very different from anything I did at MoFo. The pharmaceutical industry is heavily regulated—and so a big part of my job is navigating regulatory law, particularly when there is a potential regulatory dispute or government investigation. And of course, the big difference between being an outside litigator and an in-house lawyer is that when you are part of the company, you hope to manage and avoid risk of those things happening. It helps to work for a company where integrity and collaboration are some of the core values that define the work and the people. How did you manage that transition from litigation to what you do now as an in- house lawyer? At first it was like drinking from a firehose. There was a very steep learning curve—particularly for learning acronyms. A lot of acronyms. But that’s also kind of what litigators do anyway–litigators have to absorb and learn a great deal of information very quickly every time they take on a new case. IP litigators in particular need to first learn and understand their client’s technology—and then learn a completely different technology for the next case. When I was at MoFo I was lucky enough to work on cases that fell across the technology spectrum—one year it was running shoes, and another year it was public key cryptography. It’s not that different in-house; as things come up, you learn them as quickly as you can. But you also get to apply that knowledge to thinking holistically about your (internal) client, and the future of the business. How big is your team? The litigation team at Jazz is small— we only have two lawyers responsible for litigation and government investigations. My team also includes two employment law attorneys. But we are part of a Legal & Compliance Department of around 30 lawyers. Just to give you a sense of how this company has changed: When I started, I was one of five lawyers and we were all located in Palo Alto. We just recently had our annual Legal & Compliance Department summit, and there were more than 40 people in our department, from Jazz offices including Dublin, Oxford, and Philadelphia, convening in our Palo Alto office.