A company’s in-house legal department faces numerous challenges, including often being overtaxed or stretched to capacity on numerous projects or obstacles, facing complex regulatory requirements and environments that may be beyond their level of experience/expertise, and having to adapt to new terrain while still fulfilling its daily responsibilities. Epstein Becker Green’s team of attorneys—utilizing real-world experience serving as General Counsel, or in senior legal and operational positions, at Fortune 500 companies, health care systems, health insurers, pharmaceutical companies, and global financial companies, among others—provides outside general counsel services to supplement the capacity of an in-house legal department and serves as General Counsel to businesses without in-house counsel capabilities. Often, health care providers find it more efficient to engage outside counsel for all of its legal services.
For example, Member of the Firm Arthur J. Fried, who, before joining Epstein Becker Green, served as General Counsel and Senior Vice President at a teaching hospital and as General Counsel at several government agencies, essentially plays the General Counsel role for a health system that serves hundreds of thousands of residents in a highly diverse community in New York City (“Health System”) that lacks in-house counsel. The Health System’s two campuses are Joint Commission accredited, with residency programs and outpatient practices holding the highest level of certification for a Patient-Centered Medical Home offered by the National Center for Quality Assurance. The Health System also contains a nursing home, a Federally Qualified Health Center, and numerous outpatient clinics. The clinics handle more than one million visits annually, and the Health System operates an Emergency Department that manages nearly 140,000 visits each year. Mr. Fried interacts regularly with, and receives an extensive array of matters from, the members of the Health System’s senior administrative and clinical leadership teams; these matters are assigned to experienced attorneys at the firm, as appropriate. Mr. Fried manages all of the legal work, acts as an advisor/member of various Health System committees, and makes reports to the Board, as appropriate.
