Chapman University School of Law bolstered the advisory board of its business-law emphasis and certificate program with the addition of general counsels from three prominent Orange County-based businesses and a general counsel in Los Angeles.
Arnold Pinkston, executive vice president and general counsel for Irvine-based Allergan Inc., has joined the group, bringing decades of legal experience with medical device makers and pharmaceutical companies. He served as general counsel for Brea-based Beckman Coulter Inc. for several years through the company’s sale to Washington, D.C.-based Danaher Corp. in 2011 for $6.8 billion. He also has worked at Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly and Co.
Chapman Law’s advisory board also got Jerry Huang, general counsel for Irvine-based consumer electronics maker Vizio Inc. Huang was among the five honorees of the Business Journal’s General Counsel Awards last year.
The other newcomers are Terry Mansky, chief legal officer of the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf chain, which is owned and operated by Los Angeles-based International Coffee & Tea LLC; and Alex Winsberg, newly appointed general counsel for Angels Baseball LP in Anaheim.
Winsberg’s predecessor, David Cohen, who was one of the 18 original members of the Chapman Law advisory board, now serves as general counsel for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
The recent additions bring the number of advisory board members to 25.
“Each new member of the board increases the exposure of Chapman business law students to the business world in Orange County, gains increased possibility of internships and externships for our students, and improves the variety of advice Chapman Law School receives on its business law emphasis curriculum,” said Thomas Campbell, dean of the law school.
Members of the board contribute to the curriculum by offering paid internships and externships for course credit, according to Campbell. A handful of companies, including Cisco Consumer Products LLC in Irvine and Newegg Inc. in the City of Industry, have hosted student visits to their businesses.
“We are especially interested in increasing the breadth of the kind of industry, whose general counsels serve on the board,” said Campbell, who served for several years as dean and professor of business at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. “So the addition of Allergan’s general counsel helps us further expand into medical devices and products, and Vizio’s general counsel, into the consumer electronics [and] high-tech space.”
Chapman’s law school recently graduated 23 students with the business-law emphasis designation, the first class to do so after the program launched in the fall of 2011.
Chapman has other focused programs, including international law, taxation law and entertainment law, which were already in place when Campbell became dean of the law school in 2011.
“These other programs … provided me the model for how we might establish a new emphasis program, in business law,” he said.
University of California, Irvine’s School of Law recently started a program for continuing education for general counsels and other coursework for attorneys interested in becoming general counsels.
