We advise boards of directors and senior leadership on governance and compliance issues when judgment matters most. Our work focuses on board-level decisions involving regulatory exposure, institutional risk, and reputational consequences.
We work directly with boards, board committees, and senior executives of public companies, private companies, and nonprofit organizations. We advise on fiduciary obligations, governance failures, and regulatory expectations, with a clear understanding of how boards are evaluated by regulators, courts, and stakeholders.
Our governance work includes enterprise risk oversight, board and committee structure, succession planning, shareholder and stakeholder activism, and board-level responses to regulatory settlements and emerging risk. We are frequently engaged during periods of transition, heightened scrutiny, or enforcement activity. The firm also serves as outside general counsel to technology startups and advises nonprofit boards navigating growth, leadership change, or public attention.
We assist boards and management teams across a range of subject areas, including antitrust, privacy, trade and sanctions, ESG, and emerging technology. Our advice is practical and board-facing. We focus on how boards actually function, not how governance works in theory.
We also advise boards on artificial intelligence governance and emerging technology risk. Our work includes helping boards define oversight responsibilities, integrate technology risk into enterprise risk frameworks, and address fiduciary obligations arising from the use of advanced technologies. We regularly speak with directors and senior executives in board-focused settings on these issues.
Our lawyers are often engaged when boards require independent advice on sensitive matters. In certain cases, firm lawyers have been appointed by courts to advise on and oversee nonprofit governance and compliance reforms in independent, court-supervised roles. We also advise boards on governance and compliance obligations arising from criminal and regulatory agreements with U.S. and international regulators.
Our compliance work is tied directly to board oversight. For more than a decade, the firm developed and maintained a Fortune 500 code-of-conduct database hosted by the University of Houston Law Center. We use that experience to help boards oversee codes of conduct, reporting structures, and compliance frameworks in ways that are credible, defensible, and aligned with regulatory expectations.
Our lawyers regularly engage with directors and senior executives on governance, compliance, and risk oversight. We teach corporate compliance at the University of Houston Law Center and have participated for nearly a decade in Stanford University’s Directors’ College.
We have worked with academic institutions to develop governance and compliance education programs and have organized national forums focused on board oversight and regulatory risk. Our lawyers have published extensively on governance and compliance issues, including more than one hundred articles in Corporate Counsel magazine. The firm also created an early and widely cited database of U.S. Department of Justice deferred and non-prosecution agreements used by boards and counsel as a benchmarking resource.
Recent and representative matters include: