Season 4, Episode 13: How to Launch a Product Counsel Role with Robert Esposito

Robert Esposito spent the first eight years of his career as a litigator at the law firms Morrison & Foerster and Bryan Cave in San Francisco, focusing on intellectual property, consumer protection, and business disputes. In 2018, on the verge of GDPR's enforcement date, Robert made the jump in-house as a product counsel at Facebook, where he helped launch social good products and programs. Later, Robert joined Pandora Media, where he led the development of Pandora’s privacy program and worked on digital entertainment services.  Robert currently serves as Senior Legal Counsel, Technology and Product Counsel at Hillspire, LLC, which advises a number of initiatives such as Schmidt Futures, which partners with leaders in the public and private sectors to help scale promising new ideas in science, technology, and society.

In the past decade, in-house legal departments, primarily at large technology companies, began creating a new role called "product counsel." The product counsel role is amorphous.  Most in-house lawyers don't know what product counsel do, let alone the product, engineering, and marketing teams they're meant to serve. Join Robert Esposito, law firm litigator turned in-house product counsel to learn about this "new" type of attorney and how to become one.