“A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.” — Lao Tzu
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Mark (pic: June 2020). 5x an ops lead or co-lead | A "fly-on-the-wall" to 100+ Silicon Valley lawyered-up HR brawls | 4x a HR lead | 4x a lead starting up new branch offices or depts. | 1x an employee #1
CURRENTLY
Since 2008, I've held lead roles in operations, litigations, HR/ people, training, ghostwriting/ content creation, investigations, health & safety and other functions at a 2-office law firm in Silicon Valley which specializes mostly in plaintiff's side employment law.
I've helped the firm's San Mateo, CA office serve clients in/ from California, Texas, Florida, Tennessee, Hawaii, New Jersey, New Zealand, Singapore, the Philippines, India, Spain, France, Switzerland, the U.K., and some other U.S. states and foreign countries.
Legal advocacy teams I've served on have helped individual plaintiff employees (including 3 public company CEOs, at least 7 private company CEOs, over 20 CFOs, COOs and SVPs, as well as scores of engineers, scientists, founders, salespeople, secretaries, attorneys, I.T. personnel, HR directors, administrative assistants, and others) assert their claims against some of the biggest names in:
social media; electric cars; VR; cell phones; biotech; vaping; enterprise software; multimedia software; networking equipment; on-line auctioning; e-commerce; on-line payments; medical devices; billionaire "family offices"; flash memory products; SaaS; semiconductors; VCs; games; telecom; mobile applications; search engines; and many others.
As a result, I've been handed an enviable "backstage pass" to 100+ Silicon Valley lawyered'up & HR-up'ed employee off-boards (usually contentious) and on-boards (usually more civil), involving many iconic companies providing the products and services listed above, their hired guns (all cunning and ruthless legal and HR minds), and, a few involving direct reports to:
Tim Cook, Larry Ellison, Patrick Soon-Shiong, Eric Schmidt, Palmer Luckey, and Michael Novogratz, as well as direct reports to members of Jeff Bezos' and Elon Musk's C-suite inner circles.
I've also, 35x+, been a senior member of legal teams providing consulting and advocacy services to companies in regards to HR compliance, health & safety compliance, pre-litigation & litigated business disputes, California LLC registration and LLC manager(s)/ member(s) and ownership structuring, and related matters. The organizations served include:
an art gallery; a food distributor; a property management & real estate investment company; a motorcycle components company; a liquor store; a promotional items company; a law firm; a veterinary clinic; a beer brewery; a mortgage brokerage; a medical billing service; a specialty foods company; an engineering firm; a beverage company; and many others.
FORMERLY
Prior to 2008, I held senior/ team-leader positions/ roles in the San Francisco Bay Area, not only with other law firms (including one where I was 4x a team-member of jury & bench trials in civil courts) but also with a cable TV advertising company, a RDBMS/ SQL company, and a recruitment/ staffing firm.
I joined one organization as its "Employee #1" during its first week being open for business, and then helped scale it with its founders from start-up to a 3-fold increase in personnel, clientele and office space over a 5-year period.
I was also 4x a lead in guiding teams to start from scratch: 2 new branch offices to spearhead past employers' sales territory and market share expansions, and 2 new departments, including one in HR and another one specializing in private/ corporate security guards recruitment and placement.
In addition, I've helped develop relational databases to facilitate bringing order from chaos, and signals from noise, within what were usually 50K to 1M+ page scanned and OCR'd document populations.
I also for a time teamed up with customers and their chosen video production teams to script and produce 30-second commercial spots from scratch, or adopt/ re-tool their previously produced spots, to run "on the air" with a local cable TV provider.
MISCELLANY
I received a master's degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley, and a bachelor's degree in liberal arts from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
I'm a monthly donor to the Warsaw Institute, and a periodic donor to the B612 Foundation and the Stay In Step Brain and Spinal Cord Injury Recovery Center.
In my spare time, I dabble on Nadex.
I was born and raised in Springdale, OH and then Wyoming, OH, two suburbs less than a 30 minute drive north from downtown Cincinnati. Growing up, I also spent a lot of time visiting family in Springboro, OH and Centerville, OH, two then rural communities outside of Dayton.
According to my 23andMe results, genetically I am 99.3% European, with the bulk of my ancestors hailing from: Poland (Podkarpackie and Podlaskie); Ukraine (Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk); and Switzerland (Bern and Zurich). Others too from Germany, Hungary and Romania.
My travels have included 30+ U.S. states, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, U.K., Netherlands, Belgium, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Austria, and Italy.
I presently reside in San Bruno, CA, a suburb about 10 miles south of San Francisco.
Since 2008, I've held lead roles in operations, litigations, HR/ people, training, ghostwriting/ content creation, investigations, health & safety and other functions at a 2-office law firm in Silicon Valley which specializes mostly in plaintiff's side employment law.
I've helped the firm's San Mateo, CA office serve clients in/ from California, Texas, Florida, Tennessee, Hawaii, New Jersey, New Zealand, Singapore, the Philippines, India, Spain, France, Switzerland, the U.K., and some other U.S. states and foreign countries.
Legal advocacy teams I've served on have helped individual plaintiff employees (including 3 public company CEOs, at least 7 private company CEOs, over 20 CFOs, COOs and SVPs, as well as scores of engineers, scientists, founders, salespeople, secretaries, attorneys, I.T. personnel, HR directors, administrative assistants, and others) assert their claims against some of the biggest names in:
social media; electric cars; VR; cell phones; biotech; vaping; enterprise software; multimedia software; networking equipment; on-line auctioning; e-commerce; on-line payments; medical devices; billionaire "family offices"; flash memory products; SaaS; semiconductors; VCs; games; telecom; mobile applications; search engines; and many others.
As a result, I've been handed an enviable "backstage pass" to 100+ Silicon Valley lawyered'up & HR-up'ed employee off-boards (usually contentious) and on-boards (usually more civil), involving many iconic companies providing the products and services listed above, their hired guns (all cunning and ruthless legal and HR minds), and, a few involving direct reports to:
Tim Cook, Larry Ellison, Patrick Soon-Shiong, Eric Schmidt, Palmer Luckey, and Michael Novogratz, as well as direct reports to members of Jeff Bezos' and Elon Musk's C-suite inner circles.
I've also, 35x+, been a senior member of legal teams providing consulting and advocacy services to companies in regards to HR compliance, health & safety compliance, pre-litigation & litigated business disputes, California LLC registration and LLC manager(s)/ member(s) and ownership structuring, and related matters. The organizations served include:
an art gallery; a food distributor; a property management & real estate investment company; a motorcycle components company; a liquor store; a promotional items company; a law firm; a veterinary clinic; a beer brewery; a mortgage brokerage; a medical billing service; a specialty foods company; an engineering firm; a beverage company; and many others.
FORMERLY
Prior to 2008, I held senior/ team-leader positions/ roles in the San Francisco Bay Area, not only with other law firms (including one where I was 4x a team-member of jury & bench trials in civil courts) but also with a cable TV advertising company, a RDBMS/ SQL company, and a recruitment/ staffing firm.
I joined one organization as its "Employee #1" during its first week being open for business, and then helped scale it with its founders from start-up to a 3-fold increase in personnel, clientele and office space over a 5-year period.
I was also 4x a lead in guiding teams to start from scratch: 2 new branch offices to spearhead past employers' sales territory and market share expansions, and 2 new departments, including one in HR and another one specializing in private/ corporate security guards recruitment and placement.
In addition, I've helped develop relational databases to facilitate bringing order from chaos, and signals from noise, within what were usually 50K to 1M+ page scanned and OCR'd document populations.
I also for a time teamed up with customers and their chosen video production teams to script and produce 30-second commercial spots from scratch, or adopt/ re-tool their previously produced spots, to run "on the air" with a local cable TV provider.
MISCELLANY
I received a master's degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley, and a bachelor's degree in liberal arts from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
I'm a monthly donor to the Warsaw Institute, and a periodic donor to the B612 Foundation and the Stay In Step Brain and Spinal Cord Injury Recovery Center.
In my spare time, I dabble on Nadex.
I was born and raised in Springdale, OH and then Wyoming, OH, two suburbs less than a 30 minute drive north from downtown Cincinnati. Growing up, I also spent a lot of time visiting family in Springboro, OH and Centerville, OH, two then rural communities outside of Dayton.
According to my 23andMe results, genetically I am 99.3% European, with the bulk of my ancestors hailing from: Poland (Podkarpackie and Podlaskie); Ukraine (Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk); and Switzerland (Bern and Zurich). Others too from Germany, Hungary and Romania.
My travels have included 30+ U.S. states, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, U.K., Netherlands, Belgium, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Austria, and Italy.
I presently reside in San Bruno, CA, a suburb about 10 miles south of San Francisco.
