Monday, February 17, 2014

Jason Atchley : In-House : Here Comes the GC to Save the Day!

jason atchley

Here Comes the GC to Save the Day!

In-House Straight
, Corporate Counsel
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Business Success

It’s not often that a general counsel is publicly credited with saving the day, but according to William Alden in a recent New York Times blog post, prominent Silicon Valley investor Ben Horowitz did just that.
When relaying the story of how he kept his firm Opsware Inc. from inadvertently committing massive accounting fraud (the options backdating investigations of 2006), Horowitz credits his GC, Jordan Breslow, who reviewed the stock granting process before it was implemented by the chief financial officer and told him, “There’s no way this practice is strictly within the bounds of the law.”
“The only thing that kept me out of jail, “says Horowitz, “was some good luck and an outstanding general counsel.” He also credits the organizational structure of the company that saw the GC reporting directly to him and not to another executive, such as the CFO—which was standard practice at other technology companies. “That way, there would be no way for another executive to subvert the law in pursuit of the number,” he explains. And apparently the system worked exactly as intended.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Breslow is now the general counsel at Etsy and an adjunct professor at the University of California’s Berkeley Law. No doubt Breslow has a piece of advice or two for his students about the importance of carefully reviewing stock granting processes.



Read more: http://www.corpcounsel.com/id=1202642130549/Here-Comes-the-GC-to-Save-the-Day%26%2333%3B#ixzz2tbCYt4zd



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