So to start out, where I am now is I am at a transactional attorney for a company called Cognizant Technology Solutions which is a global systems integrator and I guess the story of how I got where I am today is that from a pretty young age have an interest in technology and when I was in high school, I was part of the science programs and really enjoyed that. I thought that's what I would step in college but I ended up switching to do psychology that piqued my interest at the time. However, at the same time, I started working in technical support and that gave me, I think a flare for kind of information systems and how they can work. I used that opportunity in tech support to eventually become one of the operational engineers with the same organization and got to dig into things and build out the systems that I have previously been supporting so a lot of hands-on technical experience. I worked at that company as a systems engineer for about a year and a half and then decided I would try to go to law school. The technology things were all interesting, but I don't know, I've always been attracted to the law so I applied in the schools that are here locally in Utah and was accepted to the University of Utah so that's where I went to school. At the time I think I had dreams of being like a courtroom attorney and standing up in my suit and arguing with people and things like that but I quickly realized that wasn't going to be a good fit, just don't really love being up there and being in such a confrontational way. But it turns out there's this whole branch of the law that is transactional and it's more cooperative in nature. So you help to negotiate contracts, and usually, when you're negotiating a contract, it's because you and someone else want to do something together, and so you're just setting out the terms by which you're going to do that and one area that I thought was particularly interesting around it was some for licensing and the laws that relate to technology. So I was fortunate that at the University of Utah, they have a very collaborative educational format, where people who are in master's programs, they encourage them to get dual degrees or to collaborate with other areas that can relate to your areas of interest. So I reached out to the people at the University of Utah in the MSIS program, and they were willing to let me work on that degree simultaneously with my law degree. So I was really able to kind of craft my own educational experience that was focused on areas that emerged between technology and the law. So a lot of classes around intellectual property, a lot of classes around data, a lot of classes around security and data privacy. By the time all was said and done, I had a very interesting educational background that was really appealing to a lot of the companies that I looked at and wanted to work for, so it didn't take long after that for me to find this opportunity where I work now. What I do day-to-day is I have business teams that either want to perform IT related service for companies or to work with other third parties that have cool technology that we help them implement and we come together and help them find a way to negotiate that and work it out so I negotiate those contracts. It is a long answer but I guess that's how I am where I am today.

I'm currently a remote employee. I work 100% from my home. It's very rare for me to have to travel, although occasionally I've had to go out for some in-person negotiations, it's pretty common nowadays for there to be more remote workers so that's have been the case for me. As far as the responsibility and decisions that I handle. So the job of the attorney is to identify and to mitigate risks that present themselves to the company so since I do this from a transactional perspective, what I do day in and day out is the business teams that I support, which are the Artificial Intelligence group and the Robotic Process Automation group, among others. They come and say, Hey, we have this business opportunity, whether that's a chance to work with another interesting technology company, or whether to sell some sort of joint service to a client or to find another way to provide services to a client. They come and say, Hey, we have this opportunity and they describe that to me and then we talk about the best way to set that up from a contractual perspective so that we can set out the business terms, we can deliver what it is that we want to do but we can also do it in a way that appropriately allocates the business and the legal risk associated with it and come to an amicable agreement that makes everyone happy. So the types of decisions that I handle relate to if they bring in a contract that comes from another party, can we agree to these terms, what changes should make to it? Can we rework this in a way that it's acceptable to both parties and allow everyone to be happy?

I'd say probably the biggest challenge that you run into is, I'm tasked with like I said trying to try to mitigate risk and try to identify and stop risks so I kind of have a different incentive structure than most of the teams that I'm working with because their objective is to either deliver for the client or to make a sale, or to really take care of our customers, which is something that we think is important. So when incentives don't always necessarily align correctly, you run into some friction and the best way that I handle the situation is to do what all that I can to understand what other people's incentives are and try to find a way that we can reach those incentives while reaching mine at the same time. And so, will come up with ways where we anticipate the client is going to feel this way about a certain clause, about a certain business term, but talk about what we could do that will get the most of what they want, but still accomplish the goals that we have. As far as accomplishments, I've helped to negotiate some pretty important alliances that we have been in these areas that I'm proud of that have allowed, both Cognizant and these partners that we work with. It's allowed them to sell a lot of their licenses, and it's allowed us to come in and provide the service and help implement those and really provide important wins for our clients because they get the best of all worlds.