2024 Berkeley Spring Forum on M&A and the Boardroom

David Altschuler is the Vice President & Associate General Counsel for Competition/Antitrust at Salesforce, a leading global provider of CRM software and related solutions. In that role, David provides strategic support on a wide range of antitrust matters, including M&A, counseling on Salesforce’s commercial arrangements and activities, responses to global regulatory inquiries, policy and regulatory reforms, and compliance and training. Prior to joining Salesforce, David spent over a decade at the DOJ Antitrust Division, where he served as an Assistant Chief of the Defense, Industrials, and Aerospace Section, a Special Assistant to the Directors of Enforcement, and a Trial Attorney in the Transportation, Energy, and Agriculture Section. Before joining the Division, David was a litigation associate at large law firms in Washington, D.C., and New York. David received a B.A. in Political Science from Yale University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.

Adam Badawi is a Professor of Law at UC Berkeley. He writes widely on issues of law and finance with an emphasis on corporate governance, corporate transactions, and shareholder litigation. Much of his recent work uses text analysis and machine learning to analyze debt agreements, merger documents, and shareholder class action complaints. At Berkeley Law, he teaches Contracts, Corporations, Mergers and Acquisitions, and seminars related to these topics.

His research includes Does Voluntary Financial Disclosure Matter? The Case of Fairness Opinions in M&A (forthcoming, The Journal of Law and Economics) (co-authored with Matthew D. Cain and Steven Davidoff Solomon), How Informative is the Text of Securities Complaints? (forthcoming, Journal of Law, Economics & Organization), Social Good and Litigation Risk (forthcoming, Harvard Business Law Review) (co-authored with Frank Partnoy); and Is There a First-Drafter Advantage in M&A?, California Law Review (2019, California Law Review) (co-authored with Elisabeth de Fontenay) (selected as one of the top 10 corporate and securities articles of 2019 by Corporate Practice Commentator).

Prior to joining the faculty of Berkeley Law in 2017, Badawi was a Professor of Law at Washington University in St. Louis. He has been a Visiting Professor at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law and he served as a Bigelow Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School. Before joining the academy he was a litigator in the San Francisco office of Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP and was a law clerk to the Hon. Michael McConnell of the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Mary Eaton has extensive experience in complex commercial litigation, with a focus on securities class actions, shareholder derivative claims and other complex business disputes. Mary regularly represents issuers, boards of directors, board committees and senior management across a broad spectrum of industries (including technology, financial services, private equity and asset management) in a wide variety of disputes in federal and state courts across the country. In addition to her substantial trial experience, Mary regularly counsels clients on litigation avoidance and corporate governance matters. Among her many accolades, Mary is perennially ranked among leading litigators by Chambers USA, Benchmark Litigation, Lawdragon, Crain’s New York Business, Legal 500 US and Best Lawyers in America. In 2019, the American Bar Association awarded Mary the Stonewall Award for her contributions to the advancement of LGBT individuals and issues.

Julie Elmer is a Chambers-ranked partner at Freshfields in Washington DC, where she focuses on antitrust litigation and merger and civil conduct investigations. Before joining Freshfields in July 2020, Julie spent five years at the Antitrust Division of the United States Department of Justice, where she was lead trial counsel in United States vs. EnergySolutions and United States vs. Sabre. In private practice, Julie’s antitrust litigation experience includes defending Google in litigation relating to its ad tech business and successfully defending McWane, Inc. against the FTC’s price-fixing claims in the GCR 2015 Americas Behavioral Matter of the Year. Before DOJ, Julie was a partner at one of the premier defense firms in the Southeast. There, her practice focused on defending mass actions ranging from consumer fraud and business torts to construction defect and product liability. Her work in these areas encompassed jury trials, bench trials, arbitrations, motion practice, and every other facet of complex litigation.

Spencer R. Fisher is the Chief Counsel for the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Prior to joining CISA, Mr. Fisher served as a Chief Counsel with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Office of General Counsel. In 2019 and 2020, he served on a Joint Duty Assignment as a Deputy Legal Advisor at the National Security Council, Legal Affairs Directorate. From 2017 to 2019, Mr. Fisher was assigned as Chief Counsel for the National Counterintelligence and Security Center where he provided legal advice and analysis on key counterintelligence and security issues to the Director of National Counterintelligence and Security. Prior to joining the Intelligence Community, Mr. Fisher served as a Trial Attorney with the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice. Mr. Fisher has served in the United States Marine Corps Reserve for over 22 years (currently a Chief Warrant Officer 4). Mr. Fisher has also worked as an Adjunct Professor of Law at George Washington University Law School and clerked for the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

Based out of Silicon Valley, Beth George leads the firm’s strategic risk and crisis management practice. Beth regularly advises boards of both private and public companies on risk management and governance, including advising on governance related to artificial intelligence, data practices and cybersecurity, content management, cybersecurity incidents, and geopolitical events.

Beth has deep and wide-ranging experience from her background working at senior levels across the US federal government. She served as Acting General Counsel of the US Department of Defense during the beginning of the Biden-Harris administration, where she advised the Secretary of Defense on high stakes matters, including issues related to Iran, China, and the drawdown in Afghanistan. From 2011 to 2016, Beth served in various roles for the National Security Division of the US DOJ, including as Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General, Counsel to the Office of Law & Policy, and as an Honors Attorney and Attorney-Adviser in the Office of Intelligence. On detail from the DOJ from 2015 to 2016, Beth served in the White House as Associate Counsel in the Office of the White House Counsel, where she provided legal and strategic advice to senior White House officials regarding high-profile oversight, investigation, and litigation matters. She also led responses for the office on cybersecurity and national security matters, including the response to the largest US government data breach at the Office of Personnel Management. Before serving as Associate Counsel at the White House, Beth was a Professional Staff Member and Counsel to the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence from 2014 to 2015, also on detail from the DOJ. In this role, she was the sole attorney serving on the committee’s bipartisan, end-to-end review of intelligence collection activities for all components of the US intelligence community.

Beth serves as a senior adjunct fellow for the New York University School of Law’s Center for Law and Security and as an affiliate at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation.

Natasha Gopaul is a Senior Managing Director and General Counsel of Private Equity at Blackstone. Before joining them in 2016, Ms. Gopaul worked at Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP in the Private Equity and Mergers and Acquisitions group in New York. Prior to that, she worked at an international auction house and a research and policy institute at Princeton University. Ms. Gopaul received a BA, summa cum laude, from the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, and was elected Phi Beta Kappa, and a JD from Georgetown University Law Center, where she was a member of the Georgetown Journal of International Law. She is also a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She currently serves on the board of Sphera.

OLIVIER GUERSENT graduated with distinction from the “Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Bordeaux” in 1983. He joined the French Ministry of Economy and Finance in 1984, where he carried out many investigations for the French Competition Authority.

He joined the European Commission in 1992, initially with the “Merger Task Force” in the Directorate-General for Competition. Since then, he has alternated between the private offices of a number of European Commissioners (Karel Van Miert, Michel Barnier and Neelie Kroes) and DG Competition (successively Deputy Head of Unit in charge of cartels, Head of Unit in charge of policy and coordination of cases, Head of Unit in charge of merger control, Acting Director “Transport, postal and other services” and, from 2009, Director responsible for the fight against cartels). From 2010 to 2014 he was the head of the private office of Michel Barnier, Commissioner for Internal Market and Services. Having held the position of Deputy Director-General since July 2014, Olivier Guersent has been Director-General of the Directorate-General for Financial Stability, Financial Services and Capital Markets Union from 1 September 2015 to 31 December 2019. As of 1st January 2020 he is the Director General of the Directorate General for Competition.

Married and a father of three children, Olivier Guersent is a member of the board of directors of the non-profit organisation Aremis that provides medical care in the home, primarily to cancer patients in the Brussels area. He is a regular lecturer to postgraduate university students.

Michael Guo is a Managing Director at TPG based in San Francisco. He is the General Counsel of TPG Growth, the firm’s growth equity and middle market private equity investing platform. Prior to joining TPG in 2017, Mike was a M&A attorney at Ropes & Gray in San Francisco and New York, and prior to that, at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett in New York. Mike is a graduate of Peking University and Harvard Law School. He is admitted to practice law in California and New York.

Diana B. Henriques, an award-winning journalist and two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, is the author of Taming the Street: The Old Guard, the New Deal, and FDR’s Fight to Regulate American Capitalism, published in September 2023 by Random House.

Ms. Henriques also wrote the New York Times bestseller The Wizard of Lies: Bernie Madoff and the Death of Trust, which was adapted by HBO as a 2017 film starring Robert De Niro – with Ms. Henriques playing herself as the first journalist to interview Madoff in prison. She was also prominently featured in the global Netflix hit series “Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street.”

In 2005, as a senior writer at The New York Times, Ms. Henriques was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize and won a George Polk Award and Harvard’s Goldsmith Prize for her 2004 series exposing insurance and investment rip-offs of young military consumers. She was also a member of The New York Times team that was a Pulitzer finalist for its coverage of the 2008 financial crisis.

Ms. Henriques is the author of four previous books on financial history: The Machinery of Greed, Fidelity’s World, The White Sharks of Wall Street, and A First-Class Catastrophe, the story of the 1987 market crash.

Ethan Klingsberg co-heads Freshfields’ US Corporate/M&A practice. He’s one of the most prolific corporate lawyers in the country, heading up market-leading projects from coast to coast in all sectors and for companies of all sizes. Every guide regularly recognizes him as a leading corporate lawyer, and he’s received numerous MVP, All-Star, Legend, and Dealmaker accolades. He often appears on BloombergTV and CNBC to discuss M&A, governance, shareholder activism, the SEC, and board processes, and publishes essays on corporate law topics in The Financial Times, Reuters Breaking Views, MarketWatch, The New York Law Journal, and Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance. Ethan has been elected by his colleagues at other firms as a Fellow of the American College of Governance Counsel and received the Burton Award for Legal Achievement for his writing on fiduciary duties. He co-founded the Berkeley Law Spring Forum on M&A and the Boardroom ten years ago and has co-hosted the event every year since then. He is very grateful to the amazing teams at Berkeley and Freshfields that make this event a stand-out.

Henry Liu is the Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition. In that role, he leads the FTC’s antitrust work, overseeing investigations and enforcement actions to prevent anticompetitive mergers and business practices.

Before joining the agency, he was a partner in Covington & Burling’s litigation and antitrust practices. Mr. Liu has more than 14 years of experience litigating complex antitrust cases and has served as lead counsel in a variety of antitrust matters at the trial and appellate levels. He clerked with the Honorable R. Guy Cole, Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.

Mr. Liu earned a B.A. from Emory University and a J.D. from Yale Law School, where he served on the Yale Law Journal

DANA MATTIOLI is a senior reporter at the Wall Street Journal, joining the news organization in 2006. She has written investigative pieces and front page stories about Amazon since 2019. She was part of a team that were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Journalism, winner of the Gerald Loeb Award for Beat Reporting, and the recipient of the WERT Prize for her work covering Amazon. “The Everything War: Amazon’s Ruthless Quest to Own the World and Remake Corporate Power” is her first book.

Jenn is jointly based in the Brussels and Washington DC offices, and advises clients on multi-national transactions and other competition matters.

Jenn’s dual location makes her exceptionally well placed to advise on a range of US, EU and international antitrust law issues.  She advises on all aspects of US and EU competition law, including merger control, antitrust compliance counselling, antitrust litigation and behavioural investigations.  She has extensive experience representing clients in complex Second Request and Phase II merger control proceedings and cartel investigations in the US, EU, and UK.

Jenn has experience advising clients in various industry sectors, including pharmaceutical and life sciences, telecommunications, technology, industrials, and financial institutions.

Jenn joined Freshfields in Washington in 2012.  She was resident in Freshfields’ Hong Kong office in the second half of 2012 and has been jointly based on Washington and Brussels since 2018.

Jenn was a member of the Competition Law360 Editorial Board in 2020 and has authored articles on various antitrust and competition topics for Concurrences, the Antitrust Bulletin, and the ABA Antitrust Magazine.  She also developed and hosts Freshfields’ Competition podcast, Essential Antitrust. Jenn has been recognised in Law Business Research’s Competition Future Leaders guide for the past 4 years.

Sean Newell is the Chief of the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) National Security Cyber Section, where he manages DOJ’s strategic and tactical efforts to investigate, disrupt, and deter malicious cyber activities conducted by nation-states and their proxies. From 2022 to 2023, Mr. Newell served as Senior Counsel to the Deputy Attorney General, where he advised her regarding DOJ and FBI cyber-related criminal and national security policies, investigations, prosecutions, and disruptions, as well as DOJ’s own cybersecurity. Prior to that assignment, Mr. Newell was a member of the prosecution team or otherwise provided headquarters program management for all of DOJ’s national security-related technical operations and cyber prosecutions between 2014 and May 2022.

Angeli Patel is the Executive Director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Business. She is also a Lecturer at Berkeley Law for the Business in Society and the Sustainable Capitalism & ESG Executive Education course. Previously, Angeli was an attorney in the Sustainability & ESG Advisory Practice at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP in San Francisco, where she advised clients on the governance of climate and social risks. Angeli has also held an advisory role at the UN Global Compact Network Australia focused on corporate sustainability matters. Prior to her legal career, Angeli was at The White House’s Office of Management and Budget in the Obama Administration and served as a policy advisor at the Ministry of Finance in the Government of Chile. In addition to her career in law and government, Angeli is an adviser to Mandala, a mental health and DEI startup, and launched her own puzzle company for women of color in 2021.

Joshua Peck is a Partner and General Counsel of Sixth Street. Prior to joining Sixth Street in 2015, Mr. Peck was an Associate with Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP, focused on private equity and mergers and acquisitions. He holds a J.D. from Fordham Law School and a B.A. in Government from Cornell University. Mr. Peck serves on the Board of Directors of Legal Aid at Work, a non-profit legal services organization that has been assisting low-income, working families for one than 100 years. He also serves on the Advisory Council of the Law Firm Antiracism Alliance, which brings together law firms and legal services organizations to identify and dismantle structural and systemic racism in the law.

*Licensed only in New York. Registered In-House Counsel in California.

Colin Raftery is a partner in our global antitrust and regulatory group in London. Until recently, Colin was Senior Director of Mergers at the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). Colin’s extensive experience extends to all aspects of UK and EU competition law, with unique insight gained from his role leading the CMA’s merger control function, including engaging with senior officials at the European Commission, US antitrust agencies and other national authorities on global merger control issues.

During his time at the CMA, Colin decided the outcomes of complex Phase 1 merger investigations and was a senior adviser to the independent panels that take decisions in Phase 2 investigations. Colin was involved in a large number of high-profile merger investigations, including Microsoft/Activision, Amazon/iRobot, Sika/MBCC, Viasat/Inmarsat and numerous others. Colin has also been involved in defending litigation challenges to CMA merger decisions before the UK Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT).

Colin led internal preparations for the CMA’s additional merger control responsibilities following Brexit and played a key role in revising the CMA’s Merger Guidelines and other procedural and substantive guidance, including the CMA’s guidance on remedies, interim measures and the use of internal documents in merger investigations. Shortly before joining Freshfields, he led a CMA working group on proposed revisions of the Phase 2 investigation process, resulting in the proposed reforms announced in November 2023. Having been involved in the CMA’s internal preparations for aspects of the UK Digital Markets, Competition & Consumers Bill, coming into force in late-2024, Colin also offers invaluable expertise in the new legislation and in the risks clients may face if they fall under its scrutiny.

Prior to joining the CMA in 2016, Colin worked in private practice in London, Brussels and Washington DC, advising on all aspects of UK and EU competition law.

The Honorable Collins J. Seitz, Jr. was sworn in as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Delaware on November 8, 2019. He has served as a Supreme Court Justice since 2015. Prior to his appointment, Chief Justice Seitz founded a corporate advisory and litigation firm in Wilmington, Delaware representing clients in high profile corporate and trust disputes in the Delaware Court of Chancery and the Supreme Court. He was also a long-time partner in a large Wilmington, Delaware law firm, where he litigated corporate and intellectual property disputes.

Chief Justice Seitz serves as Judicial Liaison to the Corporate Laws Committee of the American Bar Association and is an Adviser on the American Law Institute’s Restatement of the Law, Corporate Governance. He also serves on the Judicial Conference Committee on Federal-State Jurisdiction. A member of the Delaware Bar since 1983, Chief Justice Seitz formerly served as a board member and chair of the Delaware Board of Bar Examiners, and a board member of the Board on Professional Responsibility. Federal and state courts appointed him as a Master and Trustee to oversee complex corporate, commercial, and intellectual property cases. He is a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers.

Chief Justice Seitz is a trustee of the American Inns of Court and serves as a board member of Hockessin Colored School 107C – an organization dedicated to celebrating Delaware’ role as one of the cases appealed in Brown v. Board of Education. He has led court efforts in Delaware to promote greater diversity in the Delaware Bar through the Delaware Bench and Bar Diversity Project. Under Chief Justice Seitz’s leadership, major changes were made recently to the Delaware Bar Exam to make the State a more attractive and welcoming place to practice law and engage in public service.

Chief Justice Seitz received his undergraduate degree from the University of Delaware and his law degree from the Villanova University School of Law.

Jorge G. Tenreiro is the Deputy Chief of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s Crypto Asset and Cyber Unit. In that role, he has supervised investigations that resulted in SEC lawsuits against SEC registrants with respect to certain cyber security interests and against significant participants in the crypto asset markets, including Sam Bankman-Fried, Terraform Labs and its founder, Tron and its founder, Binance and its founder, Coinbase, and Kraken. Previously, Mr. Tenreiro served as the Enforcement Counsel to SEC Chair Gary Gensler, providing advice to the Chair as to all matters relating to the SEC’s Division of Enforcement. Before that, he was a Senior Trial Counsel in the Division of Enforcement of the SEC, New York Regional Office. Since joining the SEC in 2013, Mr. Tenreiro has obtained specialized knowledge regarding the application of the federal securities laws to crypto-related transactions and obtained significant experience litigating various matters brought by the agency, including Telegram and Ripple Labs, as well as fraudulent offerings and pump and dump schemes. Prior to joining the SEC, Mr. Tenreiro was a law clerk for the Honorable Julio M. Fuentes for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and a law clerk to the Honorable Allyne R. Ross of the Eastern District of New York. From October 2006 to August 2007 and from September 2008 to August 2012, Mr. Tenreiro was an associate in the litigation department of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton LLP. Mr. Tenreiro is a 2006 graduate of Yale Law School and in May 2003, Mr. Tenreiro obtained his B.A., magna cum laude with distinction in Economics and Mathematics from Yale University.

Mike Wyatt is a Managing Director and Head of Global Technology M&A for Morgan Stanley’s Technology Banking Group, based in Menlo Park. Mike joined Morgan Stanley in 1994 and has been a strategic advisor to clients in the areas of technology, media, and telecommunications since joining the firm, focusing specifically on technology clients since moving to California in 1998. Over the last 30 years, Mike has advised on over 200 transactions in excess of $300bn of total value.

Mike’s recent transactions include Microsoft’s $25bn acquisition of Linked In, $26bn capital raise for Reliance Industries’ Jio and Retail businesses from Facebook/Google/sponsors, $14bn sale of McAfee to Advent/Permira/Crosspoint, $12bn sale of Qualtrics to Silver Lake, $11bnsale of Infor to Koch Industries, $6.5bn acquisition of Auth0 by Okta, $6.4bn sale of Medallia to Thoma Bravo, $5bn sale of Cloudera toCD&R/KKR, $5bn acquisition of Ellucian by Vista/Blackstone, $5bn sale of Vertafore to Roper, $5bn merger of Cloudera and Hortonworks,$4.6bn sale of KnowBe4 to Vista Equity Partners. Previous transactions include the $7.7bn sale of McAfee to Intel, $3.3bn sale of Hyperion to Oracle, $6.6bn sale of aQuantive to Microsoft, $2.5bn sale of Quest Software to Dell, $4.5bn sale of Ariba to SAP, HP’s $3.3bn acquisition of3com, and $20bn structured sale of Seagate to Veritas.

Mike received a BS from Stanford in Industrial Engineering, and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he was an ArjayMiller Scholar. Mike also serves on the Board of Directors of Save The Redwoods League.

Kevin Yingling is a Director on Google’s Competition Legal team, where he advises the company on a broad range of antitrust issues with a focus on M&A. He has helped secure regulatory clearances for several of Google’s recent acquisitions, including Mandiant, Fitbit, and Looker Data Sciences.

Kevin practiced at O’Melveny & Myers LLP in the Antitrust & Competition group prior to joining Google. Before entering private practice, he served in the Networks & Technology Section of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division. Kevin clerked for Chief Judge J. Frederick Motz in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland after law school.

He received his JD from the University of Virginia and his undergraduate degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.