Minnesota Lawyer

The In-House Counsel Awards celebrate the achievements of attorneys who, among other things, navigate complicated contract negotiations, defend their companies in high-stakes litigation and defend some of their organization’s most important assets.

Last March, Mayo Clinic legal counsel Ashton Boon switched to an administrative job to assist with the system’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

At the beginning of his legal career, Peter Carlson was a litigator, handling corporate disputes, employment matters and other cases. But he would come to operate at the cutting edge of technology and law.

As they tend to do, some bad actors exploited consumers in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic by attempting fraudulent sales of N95 masks.

Marlon Cush was about 10 when his family left the South American country of Guyana for New York City’s Queens borough. Growing up in a “family of proverbs,” he still follows this one: “Failing to plan is planning to fail.”

Early in his career, before attending law school at the University of Minnesota, attorney Ryan Hoch earned a bachelor’s degree in accounting and spent a year working for the CPA firm Arthur Andersen & Co.

As the pandemic spread last year, equipment manufacturer Smiths Medical played an essential role in helping companies in other countries gain access to its ventilator design.

Like many newly minted lawyers, Mara Garcia Kaplan started out doing firm work. After graduation from William Mitchell College of Law, she worked at several firms.

Melissa Manderschied had established a career in community outreach and land-use planning before deciding to become an attorney.

Digital technology has been transforming U.S. health care, helping providers, insurers and patients harness the power of data. Amanda Matchett has been involved in that sea change, as associate general counsel in the health care division of Infor, a St. Paul-based company that develops and sells cloud software.