Team size: circa 50

What are the most significant cases, projects, or transactions that you and your legal team have recently been involved in?

Advance is a family-owned business, with a portfolio of companies including newspapers, magazines, live entertainment, sporting events, and ed/tech, among others.

In 2024, we assisted Reddit with their public offering and worked on the governance arrangements related to that. It’s one of the most successful IPOs of the last few years and Advance owns about 30% of the outstanding equity and is the controlling stockholder. We acquired 100% of Reddit for about US$7mn in 2006 – as of today, Reddit has a market capitalisation of US$46bn.

In 2025, Charter Communications signed an agreement to acquire Cox’s telecommunications business. Advance owns a 12.5% stake in Charter, and the deal required modifications to complex ownership arrangements dating to 2016 when Charter acquired Advance’s cable company, Brighthouse. This followed on our work related to the signing of an agreement for Charter to acquire of Liberty Broadband- a deal signed in late 2024 and approved by shareholders in 2025.

We have been active in issues relating to Artificial Intelligence, working directly to sign one of the first licensing deals between an AI company and a content publisher – in this case OpenAI and Condé Nast. We are also litigating with Cohere on the question of whether their copying of Condé Nast content violates our copyrights. The case has survived the motion to dismiss and will be very active in 2026. We are very actively involved in Washington and at the state level on these issues.

Our legal offsite in 2023 was devoted to Artificial Intelligence – we believe that unless our lawyers use the technology, they won’t be able to think clearly about strategy and advising our operating companies. We called 2024 “the year of AI” and developed task forces on legal operations; labour and employment; content protection; and the use of AI in our operating companies. Each task force was charged with development of policy, writing for our internal newsletter, and teaching new things in our department. Relatedly, I joined the American Bar Associations AI task force.

How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crisis to ensure the organisation’s resilience?

Advance has been around since 1922 and we’ve certainly seen our fair share of changing times and challenges.

We set concrete and specific goals every year and challenge ourselves to meet them. We assess the status every quarter and share our progress with our co-presidents. The goals are set at the individual lawyer level and support overall department objectives.

We have an offsite every October in which we discuss what’s working and what’s not, hear from leaders about upcoming challenges and opportunities, and deliberately set goals that are aligned with the business requirements.

I meet one on one with each of our senior legal managers, and we have group meetings on a regular basis as well. We discuss upcoming challenges, both in the context of the goals and in terms of the surprises that are coming up. I try to issue spot and make sure that our best knowledge is applied as a resource to the entire organisation. We strive to look out as far as possible, considering everything from whether we are staffed correctly (size, capabilities, training), learn from recent experiences – both success and failure – and identify the sort of changes we need in our approach and policies. Lawyers are expected to participate in conferences and committees to learn what others are thinking.

General counsel often speak of the need to be strategic to reach the pinnacle of the profession. What does being strategic mean to you?

To be strategic means being able to provide the right services and insights at the right time for the right people. To do this requires careful planning – understanding our industry, our political and legal environment and the dynamics of our various businesses, to be decisive in areas of our responsibility and to distil complex and uncertain situations to actionable intelligence for clients and managers. It requires being curious and flexible rather than locked into traditional ways of doing things.

Being strategic requires earning a very deep level of trust from senior managers, line employees, business partners and regulators – if you are not trusted you cannot have the information you need or the influence necessary to accomplish the goals. It requires being creative – often the simple answer is simply wrong and new solutions constructed in partnership with others is necessary to get to the right place.

Have you had any experiences during your career as a lawyer that stand out as particularly unique or interesting?

I have had a host of interesting experiences, but the most unique relate to changes in senior management, particularly CEOs. I served under seven CEOs at Viacom and the last two years of that arrangement we were in a dispute with the daughter of the founder and controlling stockholder of the company while he was aging and in decline. A great deal of press and at least two bestselling books have been written on the topic. While the situation is too complex to summarise here, I made great “wartime” friends with some of the most sophisticated lawyers and businesspeople there are and managed to maintain my reputation for being a trusted advisor and doing the right thing.