2024 Up & Coming Attorneys: Ryan McCarthy

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BOSTON SCIENTIFIC

By his own admission, Ryan McCarthy “has been making the rounds” during the first decade of his career. He served as deputy solicitor general for the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe out of law school in 2014, then joined the Dakota County Attorney’s Office as a prosecutor the next year. In 2018, he transitioned to private practice, first with Bowman & Brooke LLP and then with Greenberg Traurig, LLP.

Now, McCarthy is settling into his new position as Associate Legal Director and Compliance Counsel with Boston Scientific’s Cardiac Rhythm Management & Cardiac Diagnostic Solutions business units, his first in- house role.

It’s a natural outgrowth of his work with Bowman and Greenberg Traurig, where he was a member of the firm’s product liability, AI, and white collar and investigations groups. This being Minnesota, his work in private practice often involved medical devices, and he jumped at the opportunity to work more closely with medtech innovators when the Boston Scientific role opened up.

“This is such a fast-growing, innovative, interesting space to practice law in,” he said.

Legal compliance is McCarthy’s biggest focus at Boston Scientific so far. He advises colleagues on applicable state and federal laws and regulations, including the Anti-Kickback Statute, the False Claims Act and various data privacy regulations. In-house work has been a refreshing change from private-practice litigation, where risk aversion reigns.

“We still have to mitigate risk, of course, but our job is less to instinctively say ‘no’ than to find a solution that helps [the company] reach its business goals in an ethical and compliant manner,” he said.

McCarthy is active in the Twin Cities’ legal community. He currently sits on the board of the Hennepin County Bar Foundation and Hennepin County Bar Association, and was recently appointed by the incoming American Bar Association president to the ABA’s Human Rights Advisory Council and Death Penalty Representation Project.

Those appointments haven’t officially begun yet, but he’s already looking forward to marshaling his prosecutorial experience for good.

“It’s really important work, some of the most important you can do as an attorney,” he said.