Cybersecurity company CrowdStrike Inc. on Monday named Laurel Finch as chief legal officer. Finch joins the Sunnyvale, California-based company from MobileIron Inc., a mobile device management company where she served as general counsel for more than four years.
In emailed responses sent to Corporate Counsel, Finch said she took the new job for two reasons: because data breaches and emerging legal requirements for cybersecurity are top of mind for C-suite executives and board members, and because CrowdStrike is the company best suited to help.
"I believe that the trend is that data security and privacy best practices are increasingly getting codified into law whether that's the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or the NY State DFS Cybersecurity regulation or the California Attorney General's 2016 data breach report, in which the AG set forth her interpretation of what constitutes 'reasonable' security for the purpose of California's data security statute," Finch said. "CrowdStrike's products and services both prevent data breaches and also play an important role in helping CIOs meet these new legal requirements."
CrowdStrike, founded in 2012, provides threat intelligence, endpoint security and incident response services to customers in more than 170 countries. It has offered its assistance on several high-profile and large-scale data breaches, including the 2014 Sony Pictures hack and the more recent data breach of the Democratic National Committee in the lead-up to last year's presidential election.
Finch is filling a vacancy left open by former CrowdStrike GC Steven Chabinsky, who, according to his Linked In profile, left the company in November 2016. According to a LinkedIn search, CrowdStrike employs at least three in-house counsel, not counting Finch.
At CrowdStrike, Finch said her first priority is to "listen a lot and ask questions in order to learn the business." She said she also hopes to scale the legal department to support CrowdStrike's growth, and, potentially, prep for an initial public offering.
Finch led MobileIron through its 2014 IPO, handling the legal matters that came with the process. According to her Linked In profile, she scaled her legal team to support MobileIron in significant revenue growth. In 2012, MobileIron recorded $41 million in revenue, and in 2016, it recorded $164 million. Finch also defended the company against a patent infringement lawsuit that went to trial in which a judge and jury invalidated three of the four patents asserted by the plaintiff.
Before working at MobileIron, Finch served as the GC to online car auction company Openlane Inc., and as deputy GC and senior vice president at Visa Inc. The CrowdStrike news release said Finch led her legal team at Visa on commercial, corporate, product, regulatory and intellectual property matters, and she served as the "lead internal securities lawyer" during Visa's 2008 IPO.