Roger O’Sullivan
GENERAL COUNSEL, CORPORATE SECRETARY, AND CHIEF PRIVACY OFFICER
COGSTATE
NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK
7:00 am
Quick coffee before I walk the dog in Riverside Park, on the Upper West Side. It’s an ideal time to check my email to see if anything urgent has come in from our head office in Melbourne and to mentally map out the day ahead.
7:30 am
Back home to make school lunches for my daughters. I catch up on a little news while my wife and I get ready. I quickly remind myself to avoid news sites if I’m going to keep control of my blood pressure.
8:30 am
Jump on the subway and head to our offices in Midtown.
9:00 am
Connect with our contracts associate to review and sign-off on a private-public partnership that pertains to Alzheimer’s research. At Cogstate, we develop tests for measuring cognition, mostly in the clinical trials or drug development space.
10:00 am
Open our weekly department meeting with some higher-level business developments. We talk through the legal implications in broad terms since it will be a while before they require legal action. We then go around the room relaying the finer details of each member’s workload and finish with a list of action items that, either collectively or individually, outline the highest priorities and trickiest issues.
12:00 pm
Lunch with an executive team member from our Boston office. He uses the opportunity to bring me up to speed on our latest healthcare efforts. The US Food and Drug Administration recently notified us that we can start commercializing COGNIGRAM, our tool for assessing cognition in hospitals and physician’s offices, and he wants to ensure we’ve thought through legal implications.
1:30 pm
Quick call with our employment lawyers to discuss an update to our standard employment agreement that we’d like to implement in New York. I need to confirm that those changes don’t conflict with current Connecticut labor law
2:00 pm
Prepare for an upcoming legal conference. I speak with the organizer and other panelists about our plan to discuss issues around corporate governance, board engagement, and recent changes in the role of the general counsel.
3:00 pm
Rapid-fire Skype conversation with my AGC regarding implementation of new HIPAA policies. We make decisions regarding final substantive and procedural changes. Separately, we wonder how we will manage to start next year when one of our Australian colleagues is out preparing for and taking the New York State bar exam.
4:00 pm
For the next hour, I play with our new contract management software. To keep from confusing anyone, overwhelming ourselves, or creating any issues with its integration with current systems, it will be a soft launch. Of all the people in our group, I’m least adept when it comes to these technological changes. If I left it to my colleagues to dive in and roll out, I’d drown. As soon as I have a reasonable sense for how it works, I’ll hand it over.
5:00 pm
Quick chat with a colleague who wants to ensure she understands the indemnification provisions in our standard consulting agreements — and, less particularly — to confirm that our procedures for identifying and enrolling our consultant neuropsychologists do not interfere with or undermine related obligations. They don’t, and I’m reminded and thrilled that we’ve established a culture in which our colleagues can come to us with questions. The deeper we establish that culture, the more they start to think in terms of rights and obligations and the better we’re protected.
6:00 pm
Last review of my to-do list and a quick flurry of emails to make sure meetings and expectations are set for the next day.
7:00 pm
I’m at home but still working. A US colleague and our Quality Assurance group in Australia are thinking of transitioning the training aspects of our compliance program from (QA) in Melbourne to HR in New Haven, and there are questions as to which group should distribute the new HIPAA policies.
7:30 pm
Dinner with the family and an infuriating peek at the latest political news.
9:00 pm
Netflix time. Rake, the hilarious Australian series about a charming but emotionally dysfunctional Sydney barrister played by Richard Roxburgh. I love it for the Australian humor (humour!) and the snatches of Sydney Harbor (Harbour!) where I grew up.
10:00 pm
Shower, (a little) tea, and bed. I’m reading A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul. It was left in our Block Island rental this summer. I left a book to replace it, but it still feels like evidence of a crime so I’m eager to finish and get rid of it.
11:00 pm
Lights out. Well, no, wait — I check email one more time and discover an interesting article on congressional dysfunction. No sleeping now.
12:00 am
OK, finally lights out. Really.
