Sarah is the Assistant General Counsel and Assistant Secretary at Conmed, a global medical technology company “that specializes in the development and sale of surgical and patient monitoring products and services.” When not handling the day-to-day legal work with the General Counsel, Sarah is often reviewing contracts and offering legal advice on the company’s mergers and acquisitions.
Transcript
My name is Sarah Oliker and I am Assistant General Counsel and Assistant Secretary at CONMED Corporation. General counsel is the chief legal officer in a company. CONMED is a publicly traded company so when you're general counsel you tend to deal with a pretty broad spectrum of responsibilities. It's not just the day to day operations of the company which you would deal with as a private entity but with a public company you also have a number of shareholder obligations as well as SEC reporting. It's a lot of advisory work, or strategic work. When people are thinking about. A lot of the work I do is commercial distribution. So when we're thinking about making a change in a distribution channel or suppliers or something contract related, my phone will ring and we'll have to talk through our options with regard to existing suppliers or distributors, you know, how do we get out of those relationships and or if we're making a shift to something new, any regulatory or legal implications that might come with that. And we have a really great relationship with our strategy and corporate development department so when things start to get serious, they analyze a lot of different product lines and different partnerships, but as soon as it gets to letter of intent stage then they'll bring us in and we can start the due diligence. It's harder when you are involved later in the process because, you know, as lawyers we are trained to look for certain things, and analyze. I think we're just sometimes better equipped to find the problems that may be latent, that some of the business people might not see. We're at the end of a quarter right now. I think that for any public company the end of a quarter is probably the busiest time because all of the business folks are focusing on closing out the quarter strong and trying to push through all the last minute deals, so it's responding to those things. We also have typically have board meetings around the end of a quarter, audit committee so there's the corporate governance piece and then there's other just day to day operational things. So it's like a perfect storm of everything happening at once. It's really, some of it's exciting and exhilarating, but I think about right now and we have two days left until the end of the quarter and I'm tired. You know, it's like I could use a good night's sleep.
Download transcript