1 Hour MCLE; 1 Legal Ethics

Amber Bevacqua-Lynott is Senior Counsel in the Portland and San Diego offices of Buchalter, P.C., and a member of the Firm’s Professional Responsibility and Litigation Practice Groups.  She provides guidance and legal representation to attorneys, licensed professionals, and other business clients, including firms and in-house legal departments. Her practice centers on legal ethics, risk management, and discipline defense. She acts as outside counsel to clients in a variety of industries, providing advice and counsel on all manner of ethics issues, including conflicts, confidentiality, malpractice, risk management, and fee issues. In addition, Ms. Bevacqua-Lynott represents lawyers, students, and other professionals in front of regulatory authorities and bar associations on licensing, admissions, reinstatement, reciprocity, character and fitness, consumer protection, unauthorized practice of law, and disciplinary matters.

Prior to joining Buchalter, she worked in the Oregon State Bar’s Disciplinary Counsel’s Office (DCO) as an Assistant Disciplinary Counsel, where she enforced the Oregon Rules of Professional Conduct. During her time in DCO, Ms. Bevacqua-Lynott successfully first-chaired several dozen civil trials and investigated or prosecuted hundreds of disciplinary matters. The last six years of her tenure with DCO, she was the Chief Assistant Disciplinary Counsel and Deputy Director of Regulatory Services, and also acted as Chief Trial Counsel.

Intimately versed in legal ethics, Ms. Bevacqua-Lynott developed, updated, and presented Legal Ethics Best Practices, a semi-annual “ethics school” for attorneys. She also prepared and edited the annual annotations of all Bar formal proceeding dispositions, requiring that she be expertly familiar with each stipulated and adjudicated case result.  Ms. Lynott earned her J.D. from Pepperdine University School of Law and earned her B.A. from University of Redlands.

Tracy L. Kepler is the Risk Control Consulting Director for CNA’s Global Lawyers Professional Liability Division.  In this role, she creates the content of attorney risk management initiatives and collaborates with the underwriting and claims teams to develop and execute strategies for the profitable growth of the program.  Prior to joining CNA, Tracy served as the Director of the ABA’s Center for Professional Responsibility, which provides national leadership in developing and interpreting standards and scholarly resources in legal and judicial ethics, professional regulation, professionalism, client protection, professional liability and attorney well-being.  She also has nearly 20 years of experience investigating and prosecuting attorney disciplinary matters with both the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office and the Illinois Attorney Registration & Disciplinary Commission.  She is also an Adjunct Professor at American University’s Washington College of Law, Georgetown University Law Center and Loyola School of Law teaching Legal Ethics.

James C. Roberts III provides legal and strategic counsel to clients who create, finance or integrate disruptive tech, including small startups to the largest MNCs. He advises these clients on mergers & acquisitions, strategic alliances, joint ventures, licensing, intellectual property and international markets in the US, Europe and Asia. For example, James negotiated the deal for one of the first VR titles for Google; the first commercial AI enterprise agreements in the EU; the first software licenses for the Peanuts characters and other properties such as The Flintstones; and several of the first SaaS deals. Previously, he founded The Atlantic Advisory Group, a strategic consulting firm advising technology companies on transborder M&A and expansion. Earlier he was at SRI International (formerly Stanford Research Institute), conducting strategic analysis in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Europe. He is on the Executive Committee of the Business Law Section of the State Bar of California and formerly serviced as Chair and Vice Chair of the Licensing Interest Group of the State Bar of California. He received his JD from the University of Chicago, his MA from Stanford University and his BS from the University of California—Berkeley. He “commutes” between California and Milan, Italy.