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Our Team

James R. Buckley is a seasoned and successful consultant offering business advice from the perspective of over twenty years of legal experience inside a Fortune 100 company and with a major national law firm.  Mr. Buckley’s focus throughout his career has been supporting business objectives and mitigating business risk by managing legal support, while bending the practice of law to the business purposes of the client. He has significant legal management and operations experience, and a demonstrated record of leadership and organizational ability.
 
Mr. Buckley has extensive experience in counseling corporate legal teams and a diverse cross-section of law firms in the managed delivery of legal services, including project management, knowledge management, and process improvement.
 
His consulting approach begins with understanding the core mission of a legal team in supporting operation-critical activities of the business, managing risk, and pursuing strategic opportunities. He then helps his clients to segment their portfolio of legal work by materiality and uncertainty to identify priorities. Finally, he counsels the client on identifying appropriate legal resources and allocating them for maximum impact. He builds high performing teams by establishing clear roles and responsibilities, accountability, and transparency through robust communication.
 
During the course of his career, Mr. Buckley has developed a broad experience base in legal support and managing legal risk in such areas as litigation, transactions, labor & employment, manufacturing, IP, ESH compliance, insurance, and government contracts.
 
At Lockheed Martin, Mr. Buckley served as a member of the leadership team of the Senior Vice President & General Counsel, interacting extensively with senior management – including regular briefings for the Board of Directors. His duties included overseeing complex litigation involving contracts, torts, insurance, and government claims, and regulatory compliance (environment, safety, and health).
 
Mr. Buckley is a shirtsleeves consultant of seasoned judgment and deep experience. He has been involved in matters at all scales of complexity: From complex agreements with major corporations to simple real estate leases; and from briefing the Board of Directors to briefing community action groups
Mr. Merrill has an extensive background in networking and telecommunications spanning 30 years. He has been responsible for a myriad of projects ranging from small branch office network systems to large enterprise communications infrastructures. He has in-depth knowledge of, and hands-on design and implementation experience with, all major data networking and telecommunication systems architectures, focusing on analysis, design and planning, as well as project management and day-to-day operations of information technology environments.
 
As an independent contractor, Mr. Merrill has been providing technology consulting and planning for local companies (Consumers Title Company, Westlake Ca.) as well as more nationally-known brands like Rock and Republic Inc., where he designed and implemented a new MPLS WAN and 10G LAN for their multi-site network upgrade and expansion.
 
Prior to becoming an independent consultant, Mr. Merrill joined Amgen, Inc. as their first Senior Network Architect. Challenged with creating a scalable global enterprise network infrastructure as Amgen was experiencing phenomenal growth and success, Mr. Merrill was instrumental in creating and executing Amgen’s first IT Strategic Plan, and went on to build the networks literally from the ground up. Mr. Merrill’s accomplishments include the design, planning, implementation, project management and operation of  Amgen’s global data, voice and video communications systems, including Internet access, firewalls and security, VPNs, structured cabling, remote access and wireless technologies.
 
In July of 1999, Mr. Merrill was named Enterprise Services Team Leader (ESTL) for Global Networks at Amgen. In this role he was responsible for further defining communications architecture strategy and delivering global networked services, while managing internal/external client e-business relationships, vendors and service providers, and all capital and expense related to the network. He worked closely with the Desktop, Messaging & Collaboration, Systems Infrastructure, Application Development and Senior Management teams to ensure enterprise applications and infrastructure performance, reliability and security.
 
 
Before serving Amgen, Inc., Mr. Merrill was a Senior Telecommunications Analyst with Hughes Aircraft’s Space and Communications Division. Working in both open and closed areas, Mr. Merrill held a top-secret clearance and was responsible for network analysis, design, planning and project management for their 25-building campus environment. In this role Mr. Merrill successfully introduced many new technologies for cabling/fiber systems, Local and Wide Area Networks, as well as supporting traditional mainframe computing, high-end graphics workstations and Internet access (pre WWW).
 
Mr. Merrill joined Western BanCorp, the data processing company for First Interstate Bank, as a Network Designer and became responsible for all network and telecommunications circuit designs. Mr. Merrill created their first multi-service backbone and went on to design the entire interactive/batch teller network architecture, linking over 1,100 ATMs across 11 Western states and 7 data centers.
 
Mr. Merrill has completed countless training courses from hands-on router operations to project management. He has served as an advisor to large companies and service providers and is a former member of Cisco Systems’ Technology Advisory Board (TAB). Finally, Mr. Merrill brings an international perspective, having worked and traveled in Canada, Europe and Asia Pacific.

 

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