Note from the Executive Director
CBL Annual Report 2023-2024
This year marked significant growth for the UC Center for Business Law SF. We developed and delivered the VC-Backed Board Academy (VCBA), a new executive education program for directors of venture-backed companies. The inaugural program was held in San Francisco, and our next edition will take place at Nasdaq’s MarketSite in NYC on October 29, 2024. Big thanks to Rachel Proffitt (’02), Partner and CEO of Cooley, for supporting and sponsoring this program, and to Nasdaq for partnering with us in this endeavor. Additionally, we expanded our CBL Scholars Program, created a new Startup Litigation Digest, continued to convene our CBL Roundtable on Financial Policy & Regulation, and hosted numerous other programs focused on the economy, business law, AI, and the future of the profession. Thank you to all our faculty, students, alumni, sponsors, and other community members for your involvement and support this year!
In the first half of the academic year, we hosted our traditional CBL Kick-Off event at the Skydeck, helped organize the 20th reunion of the Hastings Business Law Journal alumni (now UCBLJ), and hosted our fourth CBL Roundtable on Financial Policy & Regulation with regulators, practitioners and academics. We closed 2023 with the 6th Annual Regional Economic Outlook in partnership with the UCLA Anderson Forecast team and the Bay Area Council Economic Institute at the Historic Klamath Ferry.
In the second half of the academic year, we selected our fourth cohort of CBL Scholars. We are very proud of this program, and very thankful to our sponsors Orrick, Freshfields, Gunderson, and new sponsor Gibson Dunn.
We also published our third edition of the Startup Litigation Digest, where we seek to shed light on the opaque world of private tech company litigation. In addition, we held two CBL Lunch Speaker Series events for students, the first on regulatory enforcement in Silicon Valley with Monique Winkler, the head of the SF Office of the SEC, and Jina Choi, the Chief of the Corporate and Securities Fraud Section at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California. The second was an inside scoop on the IPO process, presented through the lens of Instacart’s journey to becoming a publicly traded company. The panel included Bradley Libuit ’09, Vice President, Legal at Instacart, and Heidi Shortz Walas ‘07, Partner at Gunderson Dettmer.
We ended the academic year with a breakfast roundtable discussion with experts from Paul Weiss’ ESG Law Institute, Deloitte, Heidrick & Struggles, and other practitioners on the intersection of AI and Sustainable Governance.
If you want to learn more about CBL’s research and programs, please register in our mailing list. If you want to partner with us and/or become a CBL sponsor, please reach out to me directly at epsteinevan@uclawsf.edu. If you would like to donate, you can always do so in our donation link. Thank you very much as always for your support!