Category: March 2025

Barrister Banter: Catherine Meyer

The purpose of the series is to bridge the gap between junior and senior business lawyers in Oregon, fostering understanding and camaraderie. For this installment, we interviewed Catherine Meyer, General Counsel at Alliant Systems and Executive Committee member and Treasurer for the Corporate Counsel Section of the Oregon State Bar. Read on to learn more about her path to law, her current role, and what she’s learned about the field.

  1. Tell me about your path to being a lawyer. What inspired you to pursue this career? 

Late in my undergraduate studies, I figured out I was going the wrong direction. It was around then I discovered an interest in public policy, and it ultimately led me to start thinking about practicing law. And the more I thought about it, the more it made sense for me. I wanted a career that would challenge me for the long-term and provide opportunities for a stable future, and my friends and family all told me they thought I had the right personality for it.

  1. What is your practice area?

I am a corporate/commercial attorney working as the only in-house with a construction company—so, sort of a transactional commercial generalist with a strong construction component. In my role, I help guide one specific company through a variety of legal issues that arise for them, allowing me to customize my advice to their specific needs. This is a solid departure from law firm culture, where law firm attorneys keep their very detailed legal advice separate from advice related more to business goals or processes.

  1. How long have you been in your current role?

Just over a year.

  1. How have you seen the practice change since you started practicing?

AI definitely brings up a lot of changes, although it seems to affect some areas of practice more than others. It seems like a great tool for improving and economizing document discovery.

  1. What do you wish you had known before you started working as a new lawyer?

I wish I had known how long it can take for new lawyers to feel at all comfortable in the role and to find a position that is a good fit. For me, I didn’t really enjoy practicing law until I went in-house five years after passing the bar.

  1. What are your career highlights?

I ran my own very small firm before joining another firm. After practicing in Oregon for three years, I moved to British Columbia and became licensed there and in Washington. My first in-house position was with a multinational consulting company, and I gained more and more responsibility for the broad variety of topics that arise as part of a small legal team. I also learned to work with internal stakeholders with a business focus—a rather different dynamic from working in a private firm.

I am proud to highlight one particular achievement. When I was still in private practice, I had the unique opportunity to help hone the arguments that prevailed on an appeal to the Oregon Supreme Court. I worked on a small team to research extensive legislative history, and was part of final logistical discussions with appeals counsel as to how to build that research into the arguments that won the case.

  1. What is your favorite part of the job?

I love being a resource for my teammates, to help them succeed in their mission.

  1. What parts of the job do you wish you could outsource to AI?

This is a tough question because, right now, I don’t trust AI to give me the right information. I currently use it only to get me pointed in the right direction. As AI improves, I hope to see that it could help reduce the time needed to review contracts.

  1. What advice would you give a new business lawyer?

We are all always learning, so do not worry too much about what you don’t know. Find a mentor who will invest in your success, and focus on building skills.

  1. What advice would you give a senior lawyer who is charged with mentoring a new lawyer?

Ask a lot of questions of the new lawyer; don’t assume the new lawyer’s experience is what you think you remember of your early years. The most valuable advice will vary by person, and understanding the new lawyer’s experiences, goals, and concerns can help make a mentoring relationship much more meaningful. ♦

Balancing the Scales: How Lawyers Can Cultivate Health and Well-Being Today

Melissa Jaffe, Law Offices of Melissa B. Jaffe PC

Overall stress levels for men, women, and children in our culture have been steadily increasing for decades. We know that chronic stress results in measurable decreases in cognitive functioning and increases in long-term life-threatening illnesses, including cancer, heart disease, and diabetes. I know firsthand the importance of managing chronic stress. When I recently received a cancer diagnosis, my doctors agreed that it was imperative that I take steps to reduce my chronic stress in order to combat a recurrence of the diagnosis.

This article is a wake-up call for you, your colleagues, and your clients. For the legal industry, the call has been blaring for over a decade.

As business counselors, we are humans tasked with guiding other humans as well as corporations that have hundreds or thousands of humans working for them. How can we maintain our personal well-being while also handling the professional well-being of others?

The American Bar Association (ABA) and the state of Oregon have some thoughts on these matters. Let’s review quickly.

Where we started

In the mid-2010s, there wasn’t much data about substance abuse disorders and mental health concerns in the legal profession. To fill this gap and determine the scope of the problem, the ABA Commission on Lawyer Assistance Programs (CoLAP) partnered with the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation to conduct the landmark survey of over 16,000 legal professionals (the Study). The Study examined alcohol use, substance abuse, mental health issues, and help-seeking behaviors. It revealed concerning insights, such as over one fourth of participants reporting mild to severe depression and nearly as many reporting using alcohol and drugs in a “problematic” manner.

The Study results were so alarming that in September 2017, then-President Hilarie Bass requested the ABA Board of Governors create an ABA Presidential Working Group to examine and make recommendations regarding the current state of attorney mental health and substance use issues with an emphasis on helping legal employers support healthy work environments.

“The number of lawyers struggling with these [mental health and substance abuse] issues is shocking. It is up to our profession to identify solutions to assist those already suffering, as well as to minimize those who will have to address these issues in the future. Instead of being disheartened, we should view this information as a clarion call. We need to change,” wrote President Bass.

The Working Group released their seminal report, “The Path To Lawyer Well-Being: Practical Recommendations for Positive Change,” including over forty-four specific recommendations for judges, lawyers, legal employers, insurance carriers, law schools, bar associations, and legal regulators. As of February 2025, nearly every state has created their own well-being taskforce. Summits, conferences, and third-party institutes have emerged over the past decade, and the legal industry appears to be truly committed to improving well-being.

Oregon’s role

Oregon has been doing its part to address the well-being of lawyers. Here is a brief timeline of key events:

  • 2018—The Oregon State Bar (OSB) and the Oregon Supreme Court adopted a continuing legal education requirement for mental health and substance use.
  • 2019—The OSB and the Oregon Attorney Assistance Program (OAAP) host a Wellness Summit.
  • 2021—OSB’s House of Delegates approved Delegate Resolution No. 5, which directed a Conference of Well-Being Stakeholders.
  • 2022—The Conference convened. During the conference, other Workgroups were formed to meet afterward and discuss topics such as structural impediments to well-being, reducing stigma, and lawyer education.
  • 2023—The Oregon State Bar Professional Liability Fund composed a Legal Industry Well-Being Workgroup Report. As stated in the report, and most notably for business lawyers, one of the 2022 Workgroups identified the following as immediately actionable steps: “training in, and support of, well-being in the workplace, and [addressing] the disconnect from purpose and meaning in the work for many in the profession.”

Next steps

Despite the strides being made in improving lawyer well-being, I learned during my time as a part of the Washington State Bar Association Wellness Taskforce that taskforces across the country are struggling with where to best find trainers and supportive confidential resources that are not immediately tied to a state’s bar. Not surprisingly, lawyers seem universally reluctant to use OAPP services due to a distrust of complete confidentiality and the risks posed to individual positions and status of firms due to the very real stigma against seeking help for substance abuse and mental health struggles. Similarly, law students fear they may not even be accepted into a state bar should they admit to needing support.

Luckily, there have emerged truly neutral, confidential, and independent options for firms and individuals that are seeking help and are unwilling to risk potential disclosures—third party coaches and wellness assessment providers, such as the Institute for Well-Being in Law, are becoming increasingly available.

Additionally, there are some initial steps that you can take as an individual or as part of a firm:

  • Check-ins—If you are in a firm, you can encourage quarterly check-ins with staff to see how they feel about their caseload, the ability to voice their opinions, and overall efficacy. These small check-ins can help staff feel important and heard within the firm culture. Solos have a slightly more challenging feat, as accountability and support are key to achieving wellness. Seek out the assistance of a coach or group of peers to meet regularly. The group might consider an event or meetup that does not include alcohol as the focus.
  • Take the pledge—The ABA Well-Being Taskforce released a pledge, which encourages firms and individuals to reflect upon their own well-being and the culture of their working environments. The pledge encourages attorneys and firms to review their values and work to bring their daily behavior in alignment with those values. Annually, the ABA requests a written submission of manifested action taken to achieve wellness goals, then publicizes pledge signatories. Most high-profile national firms have joined as signatories and re-commit annually. This simple act of self-reflection and accountability is the easiest way to commit to incorporating well-being into your practice. The pledge is designed to be more than “lip service;” rather, it’s an attempt to get billable-hour-hungry attorneys to slow down and prioritize their own well-being. Having a trained advisor assess attorneys and conduct firm-wide value statements (where the entire firm works together to synthesize its members values) is critical to improving corporate culture, including providing reflective and wellness-centered advice to clients.
  • Play—Taking time away from the intellectual challenges of career pressures is one of the most effective ways to regulate one’s nervous system. Anything that gets your mind and body out of a highly anxious and pressured space for at least thirty minutes a day counts as play, from baseball to improv comedy to board games. From a physical standpoint, walking for about 150 minutes a week can provide some stress relief. If you need to take a walking meeting, do it.
  • Mindfulness practices—Mindfulness includes allowing your mind to literally “let go” of thought and simply breathe. It’s harder than it sounds, and often beginners need some guidance. Luckily, you have an abundance of options—simply search for “mindfulness” in the app store on your handheld mobile device. Some of the most popular apps include JKZ Meditations, Headspace, Calm, and Insight Timer. One of my favorite practices to listen to the Sharon Salzberg’s Metta Hour Podcast while walking for thirty minutes daily. Just ten minutes of daily meditation is all it takes to change your brain. These easy-to-incorporate apps can change your life and help you achieve your goals of the ABA pledge.
  • Retreats—For those who feel they are ready for a big shift, mindfulness retreats for lawyers are some of the absolute best opportunities to reflect on one’s mental and behavioral patterns while receiving support in beautiful locations around the world. Mental health CLE credits, which are now required for Oregon lawyers, are becoming increasingly available for retreats. Multi-jurisdictional attorneys can often gain credit in multiple jurisdictions and gain an opportunity to see firsthand the difference mindfulness, self-reflective practices, and intentional journaling can have on your day-to-day life.

In my personal wellness journey after receiving my cancer diagnosis, I was absolutely blown away to read multiple studies and articles stating that making lifestyle changes is the best way to reduce risks for not only cancer but also other major ailments like cardiac disease and Alzheimer’s. After prioritizing meditation, daily walking, mindful listening, and other wisdom practices, I personally experienced greater concentration, better sleep, more enjoyment even in the most stressful situations, and an overall deeper connection to family, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. Fundamentally, we owe our clients the best of ourselves. Personal wellness is critical to deliver that obligation. ♦

Generative AI in Practice: Copyright and Data Protection Considerations

Emily Maass and Leigh Gill, Immix Law

In December 2024, Apple released a new version of its mobile operating system—iOS 18.2, which includes Apple Intelligence and offers a ChatGPT extension. While this may sound like a tech story rather than a legal one, just below the humdrum march of technology are important legal considerations. Though artificial intelligence (AI) has been around for generations in an academic context, it has only recently become mainstream with important considerations for business attorneys. Before you click “update,” it is important to consider both the copyright and data protection implications of incorporating this technology into your practice.

Copyright and AI

In the two years since the release of ChatGPT, technology lawyers have seen the ubiquity of AI tools (and the adoption of those tools) outpace the developing law in the field of copyright. There are two key issues:

  • What is the propriety of using someone’s copyrighted work to train an AI?
  • Who owns the output of the AI tool?

These issues are intertwined, and there are currently more questions than answers. Ongoing litigation is extensive on the first issue, and in most cases the defendants (developers of AI tools) are asserting a fair use defense. Mark Lemley, a tech law luminary, has opined that permitting copying of works for a non-expressive purpose such as training an AI is consistent with copyright law’s objectives. If successful, a fair use defense would help reduce the universe of possible answers to the second question, but it wouldn’t answer the question.

The generative AI on the market is powered by machine learning algorithms, which means that the output is dependent on patterns found within large databases of information. For example, chatbots and spelling suggestions on your phone produce each word in a sentence as predicted by the sequence of words preceding and matched against a database of similar content. AI databases are typically black boxes, and there’s no clarity as to which copyrighted works may be in the database. Extensive litigation is ongoing—authors and publishers assert their copyrighted works are infringed by inclusion in the database. Tech companies respond that databases are transformative, the output doesn’t match the input, and any use of copyrighted works is fair use and non-infringing.

For consumers (including lawyers) who choose to use AI tools to generate new content, there is a somewhat separate question of ownership in the resulting work. If the content owners are successful in proving infringement, they could also assert that output of the tools is a derivative work in which they have rights. If the fair use defense is successful, the technology companies may claim ownership in the output. (Read your terms of use—commonly used AI tools typically do not claim ownership from users. Microsoft’s tools claim only limited use of customer data and allow users to own the output of its Copilot product, even going so far as offering to defend copyright claims arising from use of Copilot.) Only time and extensive litigation will determine whether fair use applies.

Agencies responsible for the administration of intellectual property laws have been quicker than courts to provide guidance, but there remains significant uncertainty. The U.S. Copyright Office has stated that it will issue a copyright registration to a human author who provides a work that was generated with AI tools only if the human (and not the AI) selected, arranged, and otherwise created the expression. The Copyright Office has refused registration for works that were machine created, regardless of how many programming decisions were involved in directing that machine to produce the output.

Guidance from the Copyright Office distinguishes between “assistive uses” of AI systems and “prompt engineering” on page eighteen of their copyrightability report: “The Office concludes that…prompts alone do not provide sufficient human control to make users of an AI system the authors of the output….While highly detailed prompts could contain the user’s desired expressive elements, at present they do not control how the AI system processes them in generating the output.” Quite apart from the ethical issues of using this developing technology in practice, if a lawyer uses a machine to produce a work product, there are no rights of authorship in that work product.

Legal AI and data protection

Attorneys are not immune from the pressure to incorporate AI into the tools of our trade. A quick online search lists dozens of tools claiming to leverage AI to make your practice faster, better, smarter, and more profitable than opposing counsel. Attorneys are expected to maintain competence with technology in their legal practice, and a firm’s comfort with adopting new technology can be determinative of its capacity for growth and longevity in an increasingly challenging legal market.

While this drive to innovate is nothing new for the legal profession, neither is the persistent nagging concern of how innovation may clash with our age-old promise to preserve client confidential information. Not all AI is created equal, and advertising a technology tool as “AI for lawyers” does not guarantee that the developers offer a product that can stand up to an attorney’s obligations to their clients. When considering adoption of a given AI tool, the question of whether it is designed to support a lawyer’s confidentiality obligations should be top of mind.

AI tools are frequently black boxes with respect to data provenance and disposition. This places a heavy due diligence burden on the law practice to thoroughly understand how the AI tool was trained and how the AI tool will use and protect the practice’s data once it is entrusted to the AI tool. As a starting point, consider these questions when performing due diligence on a potential new AI tool for your practice:

  • What data is used as training data for the AI tool? Can the vendor confirm that it was lawfully obtained and can be used by you for any purpose without infringing on the rights of third parties?
  • Does the vendor grant itself a broad license to use your data or disclose it to third parties? Check the terms and conditions, which are typically not up for negotiation.
  • Will your data be segregated on the AI tool’s systems, or combined with other users’ data?
  • Will the data you put into the AI tool (e.g., details about your practice, cases, work product) be used as training data?
  • Is it possible that your data (or your client’s data) could appear in another user’s output?

Frustratingly, it’s not uncommon for these questions to be met with somewhat vague responses that beg even more questions. If you choose to incorporate AI into your practice, there are some steps you can take to help safeguard your data and your clients’ confidentiality:

  • Adjust your software settings to prevent the AI tool from running constantly in the background or otherwise automatically collecting data from your email, phone calls, or other device applications where you input, process, or store sensitive or confidential information.
  • Turn off the AI tool’s “wake word” or any other setting where the AI tool tries to guess that it should start recording, to prevent any unintended collection of data. Configure your privacy settings so that you are required to turn on the AI tool directly. (See Lopez et al v. Apple Inc., Case No. 5:19-cv-04577.)
  • Avoid inputting confidential information into an AI tool unless the vendor can provide you with legally binding assurance that the AI tool is expressly designed for the practice of law and safeguarding sensitive data.
  • Always notify your clients and obtain their consent before using an AI assistant in meetings or conversations, recording a phone call, or using other AI tools when working with their confidential information.
  • Regularly check your software and devices for recordings or other data storage from AI tools to confirm that the AI tool is only collecting data when directly prompted by you.
  • Configure your settings to automatically delete your data at regular intervals (e.g., every thirty days). Confirm that the deletion is permanent and that your data is not being stored elsewhere on the vendor’s systems.
  • Beware of relying too heavily on AI-generated outputs. Outputs containing factual statements, quotations, or citation might be the result of an AI hallucination. Also, remember that AI outputs are only as good as the training data used to develop the tool and the clarity of your prompt.

Lawyers must be aware of newly developing technology, and they have a duty of competence in the tools they use. AI is everywhere, and it is bound to become a key underlying technology in the practice of law. In these days of early adoption, attorneys must take care when selecting AI-driven technology solutions, with a focus on client confidentiality and quality work product. AI tools can be a valuable resource, but they are not a substitute for good, careful lawyering. ♦