Coffey Modica partner, Michael Mezzacappa, was quoted in Law360, highlighting rapidly rising legal costs driven by a growing number nuclear verdicts.
By Sue Reisinger | January 2, 2025
The year 2025 has arrived for general counsel like a scary movie featuring monster environmental, social and governance risks, new technology demons that threaten to rip apart data privacy and security, and overlords who demand the legal department defend the company and save the day
In other words, it’s a new year, and general counsel are expected to be ready for anything. Law360 Pulse recently talked with some legal leaders about what’s keeping general counsel up at night in 2025.
The Conference Board, a nonprofit group that provides business research and advice, recently listed several risky issues for which executives need to “future proof” their companies. The issues included diversity, equity and inclusion policies; taking a political stance in public; and dealing with climate change, especially related to disinformation and misinformation.
On diversity, for example, the board warned that in 2025, DEI leaders “should prepare for a potential escalation in anti-DEI rhetoric, accelerated backlash, and additional DEI-related legislative and policy changes.” It advised general counsel and other corporate leaders to ensure clear messaging to employees and stakeholders, conduct a comprehensive review of their DEI programs and strategies, and be ready to adjust.
A different key concern arose for Ashton Yarnall, a lawyer who directs program development for executive event planner Consero, when she recently networked with legal leaders at a Consero general counsel forum. She found that artificial intelligence is top of mind for them in 2025.
“General counsel are particularly focused on establishing robust frameworks for AI governance, ensuring compliance with emerging AI regulations, and strengthening cybersecurity measures across their organizations,” Yarnall said. “The intersection of these issues — managing AI development while protecting sensitive data and maintaining cybersecurity — represents a complex challenge that requires GCs to balance innovation with risk management and regulatory compliance.”
Another hot issue, Yarnall said, was how the general counsel position continues to evolve, combining legal advocacy with the role of business adviser.
Legal leaders are searching for how to “seamlessly integrate legal considerations into business strategy while maintaining their professional independence and ethical obligations,” she explained.
Individual general counsel who talked with Law360 Pulse often raised issues more particular to their own businesses. For instance, Brian Dunn, the top lawyer at CrashPlan, a cloud-based computer backup service, said general counsel should worry about new regulations governing technology.
Dunn cited the European Union’s Digital Operational Resilience Act as a regulation “that could have significant implications” for U.S. financial institutions and data and digital service providers that serve EU customers or handle data linked to EU financial markets. The act establishes standards for managing and recovering from cyber incidents, system failures and operational disruptions.
“Failure to comply can result in fines, reputational damage, and loss of contracts with EU clients,” Dunn said. Fines can reach as high as 2% of a company’s annual global revenue, or more than $1 million for an individual within an organization.
Likewise, Klinton Miyao, general counsel at Human Interest Inc., focused on the issue closest to his business: retirement plan worries. Human Interest, based in San Francisco, provides full-service retirement plans like 401(k) plans to employers.
“Many of my fellow GCs, [chief legal officers] and small-to-medium-sized business owners are unaware of the compliance risk and cost center that their retirement plan presents to their organization,” Miyao said, citing new regulatory obligations and increased employee suits over excessive fees.
Michelle Reed, an outside counsel who often works with in-house legal teams, agreed with Yarnall, Dunn and others in seeing technology at the center of most general counsel’s nightmares. Reed, a Paul Hastings partner and co-chair of the data privacy and cybersecurity group, said their biggest worry lies in “the big game hunting data breaches that we have seen roll out in the last two years [featuring] threat actors sneaking in and pulling data out bit by bit, or those threat actors that are shutting down companies.”
Data breaches create “a huge stress for general counsel because there’s almost no way to prepare or prevent it,” she added.
One way legal teams can prepare, however, is to ensure “your incident response is top-notch and that you’re prepared because you have so many different rules now that govern cybersecurity and reporting requirements,” Reed said.
That means general counsel are often working to bring their companies back online safely while simultaneously figuring out how to respond to regulators, adding to the stress.
A second area of concern for legal leaders in 2025, Reed said, is the intersection of AI and privacy. “AI presents an incredible opportunity and companies are seizing on it,” she said, “but it also presents significant risks — privacy, cybersecurity, discrimination. When you plug in all of those risks, general counsel are struggling to figure out what is the proper governance.”
A third area worrying general counsel, according to Reed, is regulatory enforcement by state attorneys general, which she is seeing especially in the privacy and cybersecurity space.
In the past, she noted, big states like California and New York have been the most active enforcers. “But the landscape is changing significantly and very quickly,” Reed said. “Over the past year, we’ve seen Texas and Utah, for example, more than double the size of their enforcement staff at the attorney general level, focusing on privacy and cybersecurity. And we’ve seen a significant uptick in both investigations and enforcement.”
Reed predicted that more states will roll out such regulations in 2025 and companies should prepare to “face enforcement in a myriad of jurisdictions.”
Another outside counsel, Peter Lando, founding partner at Lando & Anastasi LLP in Boston, focuses on patent and related areas of the law. He said general counsel are concerned with keeping up with changing legislation and rules in administrative agencies.
For instance, Lando said, he met with clients in 2024 who were worried over the Federal Trade Commission’s proposed noncompete ban. The FTC backed off the ban, “but it’s certainly emboldened many states to put their own versions in place” for 2025, he said.
Arash Behravesh, a Lando client, is senior intellectual property counsel at Agilent Technologies, which is based in Santa Clara, California. Behravesh, who works remotely from Washington, D.C., spoke from his personal viewpoint and not on behalf of Agilent.
He said his first area of concern for 2025 — “and I think this is general for all corporations” — is budget restraints and the need for reduced spending.” This is especially true, he said, when trying to balance IP protection with cost pressures to reduce spending.
The next biggest in-house challenge at all companies, Behravesh said, is balancing a growing legal workload with limited resources.
“Most companies are trying to cut costs, and the easiest way to do that is to not hire [or replace] employees, which means more work for everybody else,” he explained.
A third area of concern for Behravesh involves mergers and acquisitions. “We try to acquire on average at least one growing company per year,” he said. “So one of the things that keeps me up at night is due diligence,” especially pertaining to troublesome IP portfolios that could end up in litigation.
And no general counsel nightmare story would be complete without a mention of rising legal fees. Axiom CEO David McVeigh recently said in a statement accompanying a research report on budgeting, “Beyond the research, clients consistently tell me they are at the end of their rope on law firm costs and annual rate increases.”
Michael P. Mezzacappa, now a partner and general counsel at insurance defense firm Coffey Modica LLP in Tarrytown, New York, has his own take on the problem. Previously he served five years as a named in-house counsel at Frontier Insurance Co. while working at the law firm Slevin Sold Neubardt Weissman Faillace Samberg & Mezzacappa.
“Corporations are always concerned with legal fees, right?” Mezzacappa asked. Unlike most general counsel, however, who tend to blame law firms for raising their rates every year, he blames the plaintiffs bar and higher verdict awards, especially against wealthy corporations.
“And to go to trial is just much more costly than it was 10 years ago,” he said. “I’m talking about exponentially more costly.”
Mezzacappa rages about plaintiffs attorneys who support unnecessary surgeries and extend workers’ compensation cases beyond what’s fair, along with judges with crowded dockets who rush cases and juries too eager to sock it to corporations, especially insurance companies.
“The plaintiffs bar is getting increasingly richer because the verdict values have gone up exponentially,” he said. “So that’s the biggest concern in my general counsel, defense attorney world.”
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