Corporate Counsel - March 2010 (Sample Issue)

MOVES

GREGORY GALLOPOULOS was assigned to represent General Dynamics on his first day at the firm, his December appointment as senior vice president, general counsel, and corporate secretary of the Falls Church, Virginia–based company was nearly predestined.

Gallopoulos’s move to General Dynamics is his first venture out of private law. He joined Jenner immediately after law school and stayed there for the next 23 years, working mainly as counsel for General Dynamics and ascending the firm’s ranks, to partner and then managing partner of the Chicago office. As an associate, he started by working on the General Dynamics antitrust case against AT&T Inc., and then moved on to handle a variety of litigation, tax matters, and False Claims Act issues that involved the company.

“I’m not sure I would have made
the move to just any company,” says
Gallopoulos, “but General Dynamics
gave me the opportunity to combine
the practice of law with the expanding
leadership role I had at Jenner.”
As General Dynamics’s top lawyer,
the Michigan native will oversee the
company’s mergers and acquisitions,
manage its portfolio of litigation, and
handle its regulatory and compliance
requirements.

“The biggest challenge I face is building a legal strategy that parallels the company’s business objectives and challenges,” says Gallopoulos, 50.

Gallopoulos, a University of Michi-
gan Law School graduate, says he
dreamed of being a lawyer as a child,
even though there were no lawyers in
his family. His interests extend beyond
the law: His free time activities include
being on the board of directors of the
Chicago Shakespeare Theater. But then,
there’s plenty of drama in the legal pro-
fession, and Shakespeare had a thing or
two to say about lawyers.

profile: tHiS guy’S no rookie FRED NANCE ❘ CLEVELAND BROWNS

tHere’S a new quarter-

back calling out plays for the Cleveland Browns’ legal department. Cleveland lawyer FRED NANCE has been named the football team’s new general counsel.

Don’t call him a rookie: Nance is no stranger to the legal issues surrounding professional sports. He’ll continue to huddle up and practice law at Cleveland-based Squire, Sanders & Dempsey, where he’s a partner in the firm’s sports and entertainment practice.

While at the firm, Nance refused to sit on the bench, instead providing counsel on a wide range of matters to National Basketball Association star LeBron James and other celebrities. Nance, who has been at Squire, Sanders for 30 years, could not be reached for comment.

As Corporate Counsel

sibling publication The American Lawyer reported, the Browns hired Nance in November to represent the team as outside counsel in its employment dispute with former general manager George Kokinis.

The Cleveland native’s legal reputation in sports circles took off in the late 1990s, when he helped negotiate a series of agreements with the National Football League that guaranteed the return of the Browns to Cleveland. He also helped obtain funding for a new $300 million stadium, and later served as project counsel on all aspects of the stadium development.

Nance’s work impressed so many people in the NFL that he was picked in 2006 as a finalist to replace the league’s commissioner, Paul Tagliabue. Nance was

the first minority candidate in U. S. history to reach the final round of competition to be commissioner of a major league sport.

After he lost out to Roger Goodell for the NFL commissioner job in 2006, Nance told The American Lawyer that he “always knew this was an extreme long shot.” Yet two years later, the NFL awarded Nance the Distinguished American of the Year Award, for the Northeastern Ohio chapter.

Now if only the 1-11 Browns could string a couple of wins together.

—Am Y miLLeR

Some Hefty Capital

The new top attorney for J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. Investment Bank has crammed quite a few prestigious legal gigs into his 20-year career. JONATHAN SCHWARTZ, whom J.P. Morgan named general counsel of its investment bank in December, graduated first in his class at Stanford Law School in 1986, and he’s kept on the overachieving train ever since.

After earning his J.D., Schwartz, 47, headed abroad to Cambridge University to study international relations for a year as a Fulbright Scholar. When he returned stateside, he worked as a law clerk for U.S. Supreme Court judge Thurgood Marshall. The Long Island native soon became a legal eagle for the government, taking a job as a federal prosecutor in Manhattan. Five years later, in 1997, he joined the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. He held a number of positions there, eventually working directly for Attorney General Janet reno and deputy attorney general eric Holder as the principal associate deputy attorney general.

But after all those high-level government jobs, Schwartz decided to switch it up. He left Beltway politics for pop music in 2001, becoming the general counsel of online music company napster, Inc. A year later, he tackled an even larger media behemoth and took a job as senior vice president and deputy general counsel for Time Warner Inc. In 2003 he made yet another jump—and landed at Cablevision Systems Corporation as its executive vice president and general