Cisco GC Mark Chandler on Automation and International Surveillance

“I don’t measure my relevance or success by the number of people who report to me.” -Mark Chandler

As senior vice president and general counsel at Cisco, Mark Chandler has increased the efficiency and overall success of the legal department while dealing with non-practicing entities (patent trolls) and questions of security, privacy, and surveillance between the U.S. and Europe. His experiences in international business relationship building and working directly with sales departments has given him the skills to develop an in-house legal department that truly focuses on efficiency.

In this episode of In-House Legal, Randy Milch interviews Mark Chandler about his path to general counsel at Cisco, how living and working in Europe helped him achieve success in a multinational company, and how he approaches the challenges he’s faced. The first half of the podcast follows Mark’s journey after law school, working in-house at the hard disk manufacturing company Maxtor and then transitioning to StrataCom, an IT service management firm later acquired by Cisco. He talks about living in Germany and France, Cisco’s production of internet infrastructure and cloud-based services and products, and what his position as general counsel involves. He also discusses why collaborative relationships between sales and legal departments are very important to the general success of a company.

In the second half of the podcast, Mark and Randy discuss the challenges a multinational technology company like Cisco faces today. Mark explains how he has used automation of repeated legal tasks to greatly reduce the legal department’s burden on the company as a whole. He then talks about potential solutions to the patent litigation issues that have increased exponentially in the past 15 years and U.S. government surveillance in Europe. Stay tuned to the end for Mark’s advice on running an in-house legal department that is truly efficient and works with the rest of the company.

Mark Chandler is senior vice president and general counsel at Cisco, a multinational technology firm based in the United States. In these roles, he oversees Cisco’s global legal activities and policies, as well as ethics, compliance and regulatory affairs, employee relations, investigations, and brand protection. Mark is a leader in the patent, security, and legal innovation spaces.