-: My name is Sarah Oliker
and I am Assistant General Counsel
and Assistant Secretary at CONMED Corporation.
General counsel is the chief legal officer in a company.
CONMED is a publicly traded company
so when you're general counsel you tend to deal
with a pretty broad spectrum of responsibilities.
It's not just the day to day operations
of the company which you would deal with as a private entity
but with a public company you also have a number
of shareholder obligations as well as SEC reporting.
It's a lot of advisory work, or strategic work.
When people are thinking about.
A lot of the work I do is commercial distribution.
So when we're thinking about making a change
in a distribution channel or suppliers
or something contract related, my phone will ring
and we'll have to talk through our options
with regard to existing suppliers or distributors,
you know, how do we get out of those relationships
and or if we're making a shift to something new,
any regulatory or legal implications
that might come with that.
And we have a really great relationship with our strategy
and corporate development department
so when things start to get serious,
they analyze a lot of different product lines
and different partnerships, but as soon as it gets to
letter of intent stage then they'll bring us in
and we can start the due diligence.
It's harder when you are involved later in the process
because, you know, as lawyers we are trained
to look for certain things, and analyze.
I think we're just sometimes better equipped
to find the problems that may be latent,
that some of the business people might not see.
We're at the end of a quarter right now.
I think that for any public company
the end of a quarter is probably the busiest time
because all of the business folks are focusing
on closing out the quarter strong
and trying to push through all the last minute deals,
so it's responding to those things.
We also have typically have board meetings around
the end of a quarter, audit committee
so there's the corporate governance piece
and then there's other just day to day operational things.
So it's like a perfect storm
of everything happening at once.
It's really, some of it's exciting and exhilarating,
but I think about right now and we have two days left
until the end of the quarter and I'm tired.
You know, it's like I could use a good night's sleep.