Neil Peretz

General Counsel at Sawa Credit Inc.

Neil Peretz has served as general counsel of multiple companies, particularly in the financial services and technology industries, as well as a corporate CEO, CFO, and COO.

Outside of the corporate sphere, he co-founded the Office of Enforcement of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and practiced law with the US Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Peretz holds a JD from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Law, an LLM (master of laws) from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (where he was a Fulbright Scholar), bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Tufts University, and has been ABD at the George Mason University School of Public Policy.

He previously co-founded legal technology company Contract Wrangler, which applied artificial intelligence to read legal agreements.  Follow him online at linkedin.com/in/neilperetz.

My Articles

The Operational GC: Becoming a Process Engineer

Technology has created amazing efficiencies in our life and our workplace. We can work from home and stream movies on the train. We can collaborate on documents across thousands of miles and determine the exact location of our pizza that should have been delivered 17 minutes ago. A result of increasing technology usage is that a larger share of our economy is in the form of trade of intellectual property goods. By its nature, intellectual property is a figment of contractual rights, albeit sometimes embodied within a physical good.

The (New) Operational GC: The Quickstart Guide

Whether it’s your first time as general counsel or your fifth time, it can be hard to figure out where to focus your attention. No doubt you will be called into countless meetings about impending decisions, most of which are tactical in nature. Don’t get so overwhelmed by the day-to-day agenda created by others that you miss setting bigger picture priorities.

Loose Lips Sink IPs

As an in-house lawyer based in Silicon Valley, one of the most popular agreements is the nondisclosure agreement (NDA) or confidentiality agreement. The latest trend for corporate offices is to mandate that all visitors, including the pizza delivery person, sign an NDA on a tablet computer before taking a step beyond the lobby.

The Operational GC: Turn Your Contracts into Real, Day-to-Day Risk Mitigation

As an in-house counsel, one of your key roles is to negotiate agreements that obligate your organization and counterparties for many years. After these agreements are signed, the true value of the agreement begins to accrue and the real work begins. To be a great in-house lawyer, you need to get out of your office and communicate key information about these agreements to your operations team.