RopesTalk

The Ropes & Gray Decoding Digital Health podcast series discusses the digital health industry and related legal, business and regulatory issues. In this episode, Digital Health Initiative co-lead and health care partner, Christine Moundas, interviews health care partner and member of the digital health group, David Peloquin. They discuss the legal challenges and potential solutions that health care and life sciences companies face when transferring health data from Europe to the U.S.

In this episode of the R&G Tech Studio, energy & infrastructure co-lead Taylor Hart sits down with technology, media & telecommunications co-lead Ed Black to discuss his private equity transactions practice, and shares some insights about the interconnectivity of the data infrastructure ecosystem.

In this episode of the R&G Tech Studio, IP transactions and technology associate Josh Jackson sits down with technology, media & telecommunications co-lead Ed Black to discuss his practice and how he provides legal tech support to companies and organizations to help solve their business challenges.

In this episode of the R&G Tech Studio, asset management counsel Ed Baer sits down with technology, media & telecommunications co-lead Ed Black to discuss his journey from private practice to in-house counsel (and back again), and shares his thoughts on the future of exchange-traded Bitcoins.

In this episode of the R&G Tech Studio, technology, media & telecommunications co-leads Andrew Thomases and Ed Black get together to discuss Andrew’s decades-long career as a patent litigator, and they also explain how patent trolls continue to be a major cause of concern for high-tech companies.

In this Ropes & Gray podcast, asset management attorneys Isabel Dische and Adam Dobson discuss some considerations for institutional investors who are contemplating a secondary sale and some steps they can take to facilitate a portfolio rebalancing. Their discussion covers, among other things, a brief explanation of why an investor may want to pursue a secondary sale, typical deal processes and certain considerations LPs will want to keep in mind, how to reduce deal execution risk and certain key tax considerations.

In this Ropes & Gray podcast, health care partner Stephanie Webster and litigation & enforcement partner Jane Willis discuss a recent announcement by the DOJ Antitrust Division and the Office of Inspector General of Health and Human Services that the two enforcement agencies will increase their efforts to collaborate in connection with investigations of health care providers. They address how this announcement is part of a broader effort by the Biden Administration to aggressively enforce the antitrust laws, including using exclusion from federal health care programs as a remedy.

In this episode of the R&G Tech Studio, data, privacy & cybersecurity partner Fran Faircloth sits down with technology, media & telecommunications co-lead Ed Black to discuss how she counsels clients on a wide variety of privacy and cybersecurity concerns, including cyberattacks and data breaches, and how it’s helpful that she has a couple FBI agents on speed dial that she can contact whenever needed.

In the latest installment of our Ropes & Gray podcast series addressing emerging issues for fiduciaries of 401(k) and 403(b) plans to consider, Josh Lichtenstein, head of the ERISA fiduciary practice, Ellen Benson, benefits consulting group principal, and Sharon Remmer, ERISA and benefits counsel, analyze the Department of Labor’s (“DOL”) recently amended regulation governing ERISA investment duties and its application to environmental, social, and corporate governance (“ESG”) considerations and proxy voting. The amended regulation generally adheres to the re-proposal the DOL introduced over a year ago, in that it removes the anti-ESG bias of the Trump Administration’s prior rule. Instead, the final regulation adopts a more neutral stance which recognizes that ESG factors may be relevant to a risk-and-return analysis to the same extent as any other relevant factor. This shift in policy, as well as the changes that the regulation makes with respect to exercises of shareholder rights, is likely to have important consequences on fiduciary decision-making and behavior.

In addition to monitoring these developments on the federal level, Ropes & Gray is proud to have launched an interactive website, Navigating State Regulation of ESG Investments, offering resources for monitoring the rapidly evolving legal and regulatory landscape concerning what role, if any, ESG factors should play in managing public retirement plan assets, and other related developments. To receive future, periodic updates, please be sure to sign up for our dedicated state ESG mailing list on this website.

In this episode of the R&G Tech Studio, data, privacy & cybersecurity co-lead Ed McNicholas sits down with technology, media & telecommunications co-lead Ed Black to discuss how his time as a litigator on the investigations team in the Clinton White House led him to a career in data privacy, and shares his insights on how the value of data continues to increase as technologies evolve.