Ole Wendler Pedersen has been named EVP Legal & General Counsel at STADA Arzneimittel AG.
Mr. Wendler Pedersen is a strategic, globally experienced General Counsel with over 20 years of leadership experience spanning private practice and European-based, publicly listed pharmaceutical companies.
Mr. Wendler Pedersen has a proven track record in advising Boards and Executive Management, as well as building, transforming, and leading high-performing global legal and compliance functions; steering complex M&A transactions; overseeing IP matters; driving litigation strategies; ensuring regulatory compliance; and developing high-impact business ethics programs.
Prior to joining STADA, Mr. Wendler Pedersen was the Group General Counsel and Senior Vice President at Lundbeck.
“Ole is the perfect addition to the STADA Executive Committee at this exciting time for the company. He brings a global strategic and operational business partnering lens enterprise-wide – from R&D to manufacturing to commercial – coupled with significant organizational build and transformational leadership experience across different therapeutic areas and regions. Ole’s leadership will strengthen Legal as a welcomed and key business function within STADA’s innovative, high-growth, and people-focused culture,” said Beth Ehrgott, Managing Director, The Alexander Group.
Christina Rossi has been appointed to CG Oncology’s Board of Directors.
Ms. Rossi is an experienced biopharmaceutical executive leader and board member with an established track record of building and leading exceptional organizations to create value.
Ms. Rossi most recently served as Chief Operating Officer of Blueprint Medicines from 2022 until its acquisition by Sanofi in 2025. Previously, she served as Chief Commercial Officer and has overseen the commercial launches of Blueprint therapies across multiple indications and geographies, including the creation of commercial infrastructure and successful market access efforts in the U.S. and Europe.
“At this exciting and critical time for CG Oncology with the company’s recent BLA submission for its lead program, Christy is the perfect addition to the board. Her strategic business and commercial leadership expertise will help guide the organization through a successful launch and ultimate goal to achieve their mission, making a huge difference for patients suffering from bladder cancer,” said Beth Ehrgott, Managing Director, The Alexander Group.
CG Oncology, Inc. (NASDAQ: CGON) is a late-stage clinical biopharmaceutical company dedicated to developing innovative cancer immunotherapies, with a primary focus on bladder cancer.
The Company leverages proprietary oncolytic virus platforms to develop targeted therapies that selectively destroy cancer cells while activating the body’s immune response. The Company has initiated its first BLA submission to the FDA for its lead program, cretostimogene, and is building an organization to support the launch of this innovative oncology product.
With a commitment to scientific innovation and patient-centric development, the Company operates with a strong foundation in clinical research, regulatory engagement, and strategic partnerships.
It’s funny what can happen in a year.
If you’d asked The Alexander Group team about AI usage at the end of 2024, most of us would have admitted familiarity with ChatGPT and the general concept of AI. Still, many of us had yet to dive in, much less dip a toe into the swiftly moving waters of progress.
Fast forward 365 days, and AI has become a daily tool for both business and personal use. Rather than being intimidated or worried about the technology, we’re leaning into learning through Webinars, classes, and tutorials, and we’re not alone.
According to, what else but, ChatGPT, 56 percent of Americans report using AI tools. AI usage rates among U.S. workers are highest in technology (76 percent), finance (58 percent), and professional services (57 percent).
Where Google was once the go-to answer, many of us are turning to AI search engines ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. About 60 percent of Americans are now using these search engines to seek information, create action item lists, write and edit, and even for emotional support.
From fifth-grade math problems and vacation planning to proofreading and research, we’re making AI work for us, leaving more time for quality client interactions and successful search outcomes.
“I’ve continued to use AI in an expanding number of ways.
Professionally, it has become an invaluable tool for market and position research, as well as for proofreading and refining my writing. It’s not perfect, but it’s an exceptional resource.
Personally, I use AI to research products, restaurants, travel options—really, anytime I’m looking for reliable information.”
“I am hopeless when it comes to math, and I accepted the fact long ago that I am indeed not smarter than my fifth grader. So, when my daughter came home needing help with adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing fractions of all types, I turned to ChatGPT.
I took a picture of her worksheet, uploaded it, and my trusty (and non-judgmental) Chat assistant gave me step-by-step instructions for solving each problem. It even caught a mistake with one of the multiple-choice questions on her worksheet (none of the available options were correct), which her teacher confirmed the next day at school.”
“AI seems to be here to stay, and the world is using it for just about everything.
Anytime you Google something, the first thing that pops up is the AI response. I can’t think of a single industry or function that isn’t tapping into AI in some capacity and working to maximize it further.
There is no question that it is powerful and transformative. It reminds me of how the Terminator movies were so ahead of their time. While so much of AI is incredibly beneficial for accomplishing what we aspire to, some of us are concerned that it will replace critical skills, such as thinking, writing, and problem-solving, especially among younger generations.
We are humans and not robots, and would like to stay that way.
“I am in the process of elevating my kitten nursery in my house, and I have used Chat to ideate on design, including layout, colors (I can describe the feeling or vibe I’m looking for and the paint brand I prefer, and it will give me specific color names/options), and sourcing ideas for furniture and equipment.
I rough-sketched our two-week trip through Slovenia, Northern Italy, and Istria this summer by offering Chat the number of days and what we like (hiking, cats, history, art, food, wine). I was able to pinpoint where in the Dolomites we’d want to go/hike, given our interests and physical ability, the best driving routes, and how to break up the travel, and so on. I used it while we were on our trip to brainstorm fun things to do for the day, or how to solve problems that came up.”
“I have used ChatGPT to make weekly action lists for myself and to find recipes for gin cocktails. I’m working my way through a free ChatGPT course to learn about more ways to use it. Research uses it for brainstorming purposes.”
Abby Buchold, Senior Researcher
“I usually use it for simple things like setting reminders to change out a filter or to communicate with my daughter if they are upstairs instead of yelling. The newest addition is a smart plug, and then we tell Google to turn off the Christmas tree.”
Yumaira Vela, Accountant
The legal industry is experiencing one of the most significant eras of change in its history. In this episode of Impact and Insight, Managing Director, The Alexander Group and Principal of SFK Advisors LLC, Sally King—a respected advisor and former COO to several top global law firms—shares how leadership, culture, and technology are reshaping the way elite firms operate. From the rise of business-focused C-suite roles to the disruptive force of AI, Sally brings a practical perspective on what firms must do today to thrive tomorrow.
Listen to the Impact & Insight Podcast on Spotify.
Jeroen Plink is the COO and Co-Founder of Legaltech Hub, and has been a transformative legal technology executive since the early 2000s.
A former Clifford Chance lawyer, he has more than 25 years of experience building companies, guiding startups and private equity investment, and as a senior business advisor in the legal technology sector. He is an accomplished innovator and thought leader, and recently shared his perspective on the impact and potential of AI in the legal industry.
Tell us a bit about your career path and how you made the jump from being a practicing lawyer to the legal technology sector.
I started my career as a corporate lawyer at Clifford Chance in Amsterdam, working on cross-border transactions and seeing first-hand how much time highly qualified lawyers spend on work that is important but, frankly, quite repetitive.
“There has to be a better way to do this” was often my thought during late-night due diligence work, and a conversation about this over dinner with a colleague led me to the entrepreneurial side. He and I co-founded Legistics, a company that built software for due diligence. Two years later, Legistics was acquired by Practical Law Company. After a few years in London working on legal tech applications, I came up with the idea of launching Practical Law in the US. I moved my young family to New York to lead the US. launch.
Ultimately, Practical Law was sold to Thomson Reuters. My Practical Law journey was a formative experience in scaling a legal tech business and securing adoption at the largest firms and corporations in the world.
Since then, I’ve worked with multiple legal tech ventures, served as CEO of Clifford Chance Applied Solutions, and sat on the boards of companies like Casetext, Kira, and others. Those roles gave me a front-row seat to how technology, when done well, actually changes the business and practice of law.
Legaltech Hub is a natural culmination of that journey. We built it because buyers, vendors, and investors all lacked a single, objective view of the legal tech market. As COO and co-founder, I get to combine my legal background, my operator experience, and my work as an investor into one mission: making the legal tech ecosystem more transparent, data-driven, and effective.
How would you define the state of AI in the legal sector today? In what areas are firms leveraging that technology at present, and where is the potential to increase/expand its impact and utilization?
We’re at a genuine tipping point. AI has been in legal for years – think technology-assisted review in e-discovery or early contract analytics – but the public release of large language models (LLMs) in late 2022 completely changed the industry’s trajectory.
Firms are indeed using AI in practice today. Right now, the most common and mature use cases we see across firms and corporate legal departments are:
Document & Clause Work – Drafting, redlining, clause extraction, and playbooked negotiation support, often grounded in a firm’s own precedent bank.
Legal Research & Knowledge Retrieval – AI-assisted research layered over traditional databases, plus internal knowledge search over opinions, memos, and templates.
Summarization at Scale – Summarizing long documents, hearings, interview notes, discovery productions, and even entire matters for internal or client reporting.
E-Discovery and Investigations – More intelligent classification, clustering, and prioritization of large document sets.
Operational Tasks – Time entry narratives, matter opening, conflicts descriptions, engagement letters, and other routine but high-volume workflows.
There are, however, areas where the potential is still under-realized. The next phase of impact goes beyond “co-pilot” features to deeper structural change:
AI-First Workflows – Designing end-to-end processes (e.g., an M&A review, a regulatory change program) around AI from the start, rather than sprinkling AI on top of legacy workflows.
Matter Economics & Pricing – Using AI over matter data to inform staffing models, budgets, and alternative fee arrangements in a far more granular way.
Knowledge-Driven Products – Turning firm expertise into semi-productized offerings – compliance tools, diagnostics, playbooks – sold as subscriptions or fixed-fee services.
Client Collaboration – Shared AI-enabled workspaces with clients, where both sides see the same data, risks, and status in real time.
So, I’d describe the current state as: broad experimentation and deep adoption in certain areas, with a clear path to more transformative, workflow- and business-model-level change over the next few years.
What are some of the challenges you’ve seen in the uptake and adoption of AI solutions in law firm environments, and how do firms overcome those behavioral, functional, or other institutional barriers?
The challenges I see are less about the technology and more about behavior, incentives, and governance. Key barriers to adoption include:
Validation Tax – Currently, in many cases, the return on investment is dampened by the (increasingly perceived) need to validate. AI does a first pass of a task, and then human lawyers validate the results. As the technology matures, this will reduce.
Billable-Hour Economics – If your business model rewards hours, a tool whose headline promise is “do this in half the time” can feel misaligned.
Risk Culture & Perfectionism – Law firms operate in a zero-defect environment. “Occasional hallucinations” is not an acceptable feature in that context.
Change Fatigue & Tool Sprawl – Many firms already have more tools than they fully use. Lawyers are rightly skeptical of “yet another platform.”
Skills and Confidence Gaps – Associates and partners aren’t trained prompt engineers; without guidance, they either over-trust or under-use the tools. Many lawyers don’t see the “art of the possible.” The imagination gap is real.
Client Expectations – Some clients are pushing firms to use AI; others are nervous. That ambiguity tends to slow internal decisions.
What the more successful firms are doing:
Start with concrete, high-value use cases. Pick a few workflows – e.g., first-draft research memos, playbooked NDAs, or deposition summaries – where AI can clearly save time and improve consistency. Measure the impact and talk about it.
Create a proper AI governance structure. The firms doing this well have a cross-functional AI committee (IT, KM, risk, innovation, practice leadership, professional development) that sets guardrails, approves tools, and owns a roadmap, rather than letting each partner or practice improvise.
Co-design with lawyers, don’t “deploy at” them. Sit down with partners, associates, and professional staff and redesign the workflow together. If they help shape it, they’re far more likely to use it.
Invest in training and playbooks, not just licenses. Clear guidance – “use it for X, never for Y; always do Z as a human check” – plus hands-on training sessions and champions in each practice group.
Align incentives. That can mean recognizing matter teams that use AI to deliver better value, factoring efficiency into compensation discussions, or building AI usage into innovation awards and promotion narratives.
Let technology support you.
Where lawyers are no longer cutting their teeth on mind-numbing but useful training tasks like due diligence as a result of AI, AI is not the problem but the solution. Also, leverage the technology to train the partners of tomorrow. For example, Verbit, in collaboration with AltaClaro, has developed mock depositions using AI in a transformative way.
In short, technology is the easy part. The hard part is treating AI adoption as a strategic change initiative, not an app rollout.
Information security/cyber security is always near top of mind for law firms and their clients when implementing new technologies. What are the risks inherent in AI utilization and how can firms think through addressing those?
Security and confidentiality are existential issues for law firms, so it’s healthy that they’re skeptical.
There are certain key risk areas we focus on in conversations with firms:
Don’t Use Consumer AI – Rely instead on specialist tools like Harvey, Legora, CoCounsel, Lexis+AI, August, Newcode.ai, and others, or the enterprise version of LLMs that explicitly confirm that they don’t access confidential data or train their models on your prompts and outputs.
Client Policies – Ensure you comply with client requirements and restrictions on AI use. An AI governance tool like Truth Systems may help here.
Model Behavior Risks – Be aware of and know to look for hallucinations, biased outputs, or “over-confident wrong answers” in high-stakes contexts.
Access & Identity – Who can use which models on which datasets, from where, and with what log-in? A tool like Lega may help gain insights here.
Supply-Chain Risk – Many AI tools are built on top of underlying LLMs and cloud providers; firms need to understand that full stack.
Regulatory & Cross-Border Issues – Different jurisdictions have different views on data residency, privacy, and AI regulation. Global firms have to harmonize a policy across all of them.
Some practical mitigation strategies are quickly becoming best practice:
Use enterprise-grade, non-training environments. Whether it’s a vendor tool or a firm’s own AI deployment, ensure contractual and technical guarantees that client data is not used to train public models.
Segment data and apply least-privilege access. Treat your knowledge repositories and client data as different risk tiers and don’t make everything searchable by everyone just because the AI can handle it.
Create firm-wide AI use policies. Set clear guidelines about when public tools are prohibited, when approved tools may or must be used, how to label AI-assisted work, and when human review is mandatory.
Vendor due diligence. Extend your existing security and privacy questionnaires to include AI-specific topics, including model sources, data retention, red-teaming practices, audit rights, and more.
Monitor and iterate. Log AI usage, review incidents or near-misses, and update guardrails. AI is moving fast; your governance has to be a living framework, not a one-off policy document.
The overall message I give firms is this: you can be secure and still be ambitious. The real long-term risk is not “we tried AI, and something went wrong”; it’s “we refused to engage and drifted behind our clients and competitors.”
As you look to and beyond the horizon in legal innovation, what do you see as the next conceptually revolutionary technology out there?
If you look just a little ahead of where we are today, I think three developments are especially important.
Agentic, workflow-native AI. Today’s tools are mostly copilots: they respond when you ask them something. The next wave will be agents that can take multi-step actions across systems – “ingest this data room, update our risk register, draft the client summary, and route issues to the right people” – all while staying inside strong guardrails.
AI-native legal platforms, not AI features bolted on. We’ll see platforms designed from scratch around AI: data models, permissions, user experiences, and business models that assume AI is doing a large share of the work. That has big implications for how legal work is priced, staffed, and measured.
A shift from “tools” to “operating model change.” The truly revolutionary impact won’t be a specific product; it will be firms and legal departments re-architecting how they deliver value – more productized services, more collaboration with clients, and new career paths for people who are great at orchestrating human-plus-machine workflows.
From our vantage point at Legaltech Hub – where we track vendors, advise firms and vendors, and speak regularly with investors – I’d summarize it this way: we’re moving from an era where technology supported the traditional model of legal work, to one where technology is starting to reshape that model itself.
That’s both the challenge and the opportunity for everyone in the ecosystem.
With the holidays approaching and gatherings of all kinds filling up the calendar, politics is sure to creep into conversation.
Spreading good cheer and civility can be challenging, so Managing Director Jane Howze turned to Mike Mower for his thoughts on how to create peaceful exchanges with family and friends this holiday season for Episode Two of the Impact & Insight podcast.
Mower is the Senior Advisor of Community Outreach and Intergovernmental Affairs for Utah Governor Spencer J. Cox and is widely respected for his roles serving with Provo Mayor Lewis Billings, Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt, and Congressmen Howard Nielson and Chris Cannon.
He shares highlights of his political career and how to truly make the holidays merry and bright—regardless of political affiliation.
It’s a wonderfully encouraging and insightful conversation, with wisdom for all.
The Alexander Group introduces its first podcast, “Impact & Insight: Leadership, Perspective, Change,” a conversation with innovators, change-makers, and leaders from diverse industries and interests.
Managing Director Jane Howze kicks off The Alexander Group’s inaugural podcast with Cynthia Jamison, Public Company Chairman and Author of “Shards in My Hair: Tales from Breaking the Glass Ceiling.”
Shards in My Hair is a lighthearted yet cautionary tale about what it means to make it to the top echelons of business.
Cindie Jamison rose from entry-level training programs to chair multiple public company boards of directors-along the way encountering the lessons and pitfalls that inevitably occur over the course of a career. As a finance executive, she endured tough bosses, bad jobs, “you can’t make this stuff up” adventures, and colorful characters along the way.
As a single mom, she struggled financially, emotionally, and logistically to raise four boys. The combination of the two makes for a ride that will entertain, teach, scare, and thrill you.
Her light touch and self-deprecating approach make this book fun to read, laugh-out-loud funny—yet still achingly personal and vividly instructional for anyone trying to balance it all and climb the corporate ladder.
Developing Leadership Capability Across the C-Suite
(A Perspective from Beth Ehrgott, The Alexander Group)
In today’s world of constant disruption — shifting markets, rapid technological tides, uncertain economies — one enduring reality holds: the strength and trajectory of an organization ride on the shoulders of its leaders. For the modern C-suite, leadership development is no longer a checkbox exercise. It’s a strategic, evolving discipline.
Why It Matters
CEOs and the entire C-Suite are asked to operate on multiple planes: deliver positive financial results, build and sustain a growth culture, guide transformation, and anticipate the future. Leadership isn’t a static asset. It’s living, breathing, and must adapt with the same speed and intentionality that companies demand from the rest of the business.
At The Alexander Group, over four decades of working alongside boards and executive teams, we’ve observed that deliberate leadership capability building is the true differentiator of enduring companies. One of the most rewarding aspects of our work is helping clients define what leadership capability really means for their organization — not just for the next hire, but for the company they aspire to become. With preparation, clarity, and courage, these leaders become catalysts for growth and transformation.
The best companies see leadership capability as a long-term investment — cultivating leaders who adapt, innovate, inspire, and translate vision into impact.
Here’s a real-world moment that captures this:
Before beginning two pivotal C-suite searches for a publicly traded biotech client, the CEO and I invested time in reimagining what the leadership team would need two to five years out. Their science was world-class; their pipeline promising. But they lacked scaled commercial leadership globally and enterprise-level strategists who could lead the company through organizational metamorphosis. The CEO recognized that transformation starts with people — but also that leaders must be aligned in vision, drive a “we” culture, and carry both operational grit and strategic imagination. That groundwork shaped not only how we recruited but how the leadership narrative unfolded.
Seven Competencies You Must Cultivate at the Top
1. Strategic Capability
Turning vision into action is both an art and discipline.
Strategic capability means anticipating shifts, connecting the dots, and aligning people and priorities to long-term value. It’s where big-picture thinking meets purposeful execution.
2. Leadership & People EQ
When executives invest in leadership development, it signals that people matter. This isn’t about elevating a few individuals — it’s about shaping the collective DNA of an organization. Emotional intelligence, inclusion, and cultural stewardship turn leadership into a shared language that drives performance.
3. Operational & Cross-Functional Fluency
Complex organizations require leaders who think beyond their verticals. At scale, no function stands alone —appreciating how finance, technology, operations, commercial, and risk intersect leads to smarter decisions and deeper collaboration.
4. Digital & AI Aptitude
Technology has become another business differentiator. C-suite leaders don’t need to code, but they must know how to harness digital tools to unlock opportunity, mitigate risk, and make faster, data-driven decisions.
5. Change Resilience & Agility
Change isn’t an event. It’s constant. Agility helps leaders stay grounded while navigating uncertainty. The best leaders balance steadiness with speed — providing clarity and confidence when everything else feels in motion.
6. Governance & Board Readiness
Today’s executives often operate in the boardroom as well as the business. Understanding governance, fiduciary duty, and board dynamics strengthens stewardship and prepares leaders for broader influence.
7. Personal & Reflective Capacity
Great leadership begins with self-awareness. Reflective leaders pause, learn, and realign — they lead with clear, values-rooted decision-making. These are the quiet levers that help leaders remain authentic, ethical, and sustainable.
A Parting Thought
If leadership capability development is framed merely as a program or HR initiative, it will always fall short. Done right, it becomes part of the operating system — it’s how teams learn faster, collaborate more deeply, and stay one step ahead of disruption.
Over our more than 40 years at The Alexander Group, working with clients globally, we’ve seen how building intentional leadership capabilities not only elevates individual executives but also transforms the enterprise itself. And it’s an honor to partner with leaders who are willing to lean into that work — not just for today, but for what’s next.
Since our founding in 1984, our firm has conducted dozens of COO searches for the nation’s leading law firms. Over that time, one truth has become clear: the search doesn’t end when the candidate accepts the position. Running a large law firm today is complex. The modern COO must lead international management teams, safeguard client data, ensure operational resiliency, and navigate a dynamic regulatory and political landscape.
When a law firm hires a new COO, the first 100 days are critical to establishing credibility, building trust, and laying the foundation for long-term success. We asked four sitting COOs at Am Law 100 firms to share advice for law firm chairs and managing partners on how to set a new COO up for success. All these COOs were highly complimentary of their chairs for a smooth introduction and orientation to their firms.
Their collective wisdom can be distilled into six key actions.
Signal Visible Support from Day One
Every COO we spoke with emphasized how important it is that chair and firm leadership visibly endorse the new hire—both publicly and privately.
Dave Boden, COO of Haynes Boone, described how his chairman’s strong support gave him immediate credibility among partners and allowed him to do his job effectively. Boden suggests that a chairman’s support should show up in firmwide announcements, an introduction at partners’ meetings, and ideally a personal message (video or in person) reinforcing the COO’s qualifications and the chair’s confidence.
Create a Structured, Thoughtful Orientation
Don’t leave onboarding to chance.
Victor Nuñez of Cooley described a multi-week orientation program that included office visits, participation in board meetings, and scheduled introductions to key partners and business professionals. That blueprint was developed jointly by HR and senior leadership to make sure no relationship was overlooked. Whether formalized or not, the early months should map out key meetings, topical briefings, and office visits.
Facilitate Relationship-Building Across the Firm
Speed matters in establishing trust.
Brian Gross of Morrison & Foerster emphasized that his earlier interviews across the firm gave him insight into the partnership’s mindset even before day one. For firms that ran a leaner search, replicate that exposure after the hire: identify the 20–30 partners whose support is critical and make sure the COO meets them early, ideally in person. As part of that, the chair can accompany the COO on initial office visits or roadshows to accelerate buy-in. It is equally important for a new COO to meet not only their direct reports, but also the team underneath their direct reports. As one COO commented, “It’s important to meet the people who are doing a lot of the hard work.”
Set Communication Rhythms and Clear Boundaries
Agreeing on communication protocols from the start is essential.
Weekly one-on-ones with the chair, informal check-ins, and periodic strategy dinners help keep the COO plugged into firm leadership. Equally important: clarifying decision-making authority and escalation protocols. For example, Rob Brown of Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton made the point that a clear mutual understanding between the COO or Executive Director and the Chair/Managing Partner on where the Chair wants to be involved in joint decisions very much helps to build mutual trust and understanding. The absence of that clear framework can slow down critical decision-making and create organizational confusion.
Balance Patience with Momentum
Early listening is critical.
Several COOs described their first months as a “honeymoon period” spent observing, asking questions, and building informal influence. Boden, for instance, used that time to gather observations and perspectives from his chairman, laying the groundwork for future initiatives. That said, some COOs cautioned that waiting too long may not be ideal—early personnel moves, or other changes might be necessary. The key is to pace change carefully and communicate the rationale clearly to partners.
Include Coaching and Team Building
Many firms, especially those hiring a first-time COO or someone from outside the legal industry, find it beneficial to engage an experienced coach. A coach who has held a COO role within a law firm can help the new leader grasp the nuanced dynamics of firm operations and avoid common pitfalls.
In our work, we often pair coaching with a facilitated team-building session for the COO and their direct reports. Using Personalysis, a well-known personality-based assessment tool, we explore how each team member makes decisions, communicates, and contributes. From these results, we produce a team profile that helps everyone understand how to collaborate more effectively, providing the COO with early insights into leading their team. Direct reports frequently tell us this exercise helps them adapt more quickly and fosters early trust.
The Payoff
When onboarding is handled intentionally, the results speak for themselves: stronger alignment between leadership and partners, smoother decision-making, and a COO freed to focus on strategy rather than credibility-building. As one COO put it, “If you don’t have the partnerships, confidence, and solid channels of communication, you’re crippled from the start.”
For firms preparing to welcome a new COO, taking these six steps—visible support, structured orientation, relationship-building, clear communication, paced change, and coaching/team-building—can transform a promise-filled hire into a transformational leader.
The death of Robert Redford — beloved actor, philanthropist, and champion of independent film — brought tributes from around the world. None were more heartfelt than those from the Sundance film community, where Redford’s vision of founding the Sundance Film Festival in 1981 gave thousands of filmmakers and actors their first opportunity.
I have been fortunate enough to review films at Sundance for more than a decade, which has left me with a deep appreciation for Redford and the festival’s role in shaping independent cinema. Below are five of my favorite Sundance films that capture his legacy.
Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies and Videotape (1989) tells the story of a man (James Spader) whose habit of videotaping women talking about their lives disrupts the fragile marriage of a young couple (Andie MacDowell and Peter Gallagher). Its honest, sometimes uncomfortable take on intimacy and betrayal surprised Sundance audiences, won the Audience Award, and helped kick off a new wave of independent filmmaking. More than thirty years later, this low-budget, cerebral film still packs a punch and remains one of the defining titles that put the Sundance Film Festival on the map.
(Available on Amazon, Apple TV, or Fandango at Home.)
Searching for Sugar Man (2012) tells the story of 1970s singer-songwriter Rodriguez, who many considered the equal of Bob Dylan but who vanished from the music scene after recording just two albums. A bootlegged copy of one of his records made its way to South Africa, where he became a cult hero, selling more records than Elvis Presley. The film follows the search from South Africa to California and Detroit to uncover what really happened to him, with the final scenes famously shot on an iPhone after the production ran out of money — a testament to the power of storytelling over budget. This extraordinary documentary went on to win the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and remains one of Sundance’s most uplifting discoveries.
(Streaming on Amazon, Apple TV, or Google Play Movies.)
Financed by private donations, Rebirth (2011) followed five individuals impacted by the 9/11 attacks over a ten-year period as they grieved and rebuilt their lives. The film focused not on the event itself, but on how humans are hard-wired to heal, interweaving intimate stories with time-lapse footage of Ground Zero’s cleanup and rebuilding. I think of this remarkable film every September and wonder how the individuals are faring decades later. For many years, clips of this emotional film were screened at the 9/11 Memorial Museum.
(Available on Apple TV and Amazon Video.)
Blythe Danner delivered what may be her career-best performance in I’ll See You in My Dreams (2015), playing a widow navigating aging, grief, and a late-in-life romance with the handsome and dashing Sam Elliott. Written and directed by then-unknown Brett Haley, it’s an honest story about loss, resilience, and the unexpected ways love and friendship can return to your life. With a bigger studio marketing push, Danner might well have been an Oscar nominee. This is the film I most often recommend to friends — and they always thank me.
(Available on Netflix, Amazon Video, Fandango at Home, and Apple TV.)
The tender coming-of-age drama CODA (2021) follows Ruby (Emilia Jones), the only hearing member of a deaf family, as she serves as their interpreter while pursuing her dream of becoming a singer. One of the film’s most powerful moments shows the world through her parents’ eyes — able to see the applause when she sings on stage but not hear it. The music, filled with familiar oldies, gives the film much of its heart. Apple acquired CODA for a record $25 million, and it went on to become the first Sundance premiere to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Troy Kotsur also made history as the first deaf male actor to win an Academy Award.
(Available on Apple TV, Amazon Prime, Google Movies, and Fandango at Home.)
There have been thousands of films that got their start at Sundance, but these five remain my personal favorites. They reflect the powerful, daring storytelling that Robert Redford championed, ensuring that his vision for independent film will live on.
Jane Howze is managing director of The Alexander Group, a national executive search firm. She has covered every Sundance Film Festival since 2011.
