Guest Speaker Gretchen Klebasko

In our last class session, Gretchen Klebasko came to speak about what she does at Legg Mason. Gretchen heads the intellectual property team at Legg Mason. I truly enjoyed our discussion as we had the opportunity to see more of the legal side of Legg Mason’s operations as opposed to strictly the business and marketing which we so often study as MBA students. Additionally, I personally took a great deal of interest in this discussion as so much of my professional background has been based in various forms intellectual property development and protection. There are a few points which Gretchen made on which I would like to comment.

First, I thought it was incredibly interesting to learn more about the steps that Legg Mason takes to conduct business and serve its customers while monitoring and/or limiting the divulgence of proprietary information and other various forms of sensitive information. As is the case with most modern organizations, this means monitoring the actions of employees in the digital world through social networking websites such as LinkedIn and Facebook. According to Gretchen , Legg Mason truly goes to great efforts to watch its employee’s actions on these websites. This really made me think about the level of exposure we assume when we use these social networking sites. It’s not that I think that companies shouldn’t be able to look at what its employees are posting on the internet; of course they should. Instead, I’m questioning why we feel so compelled to share such intimate details of our personal or work lives with others on social networking sites when most of us would never share industry secrets other sensitive work-related information with other firms directly. So, perhaps the real goal of Legg Mason and other really any other firm which has similar sensitive information should be to foster a culture which is uncomfortable with actively using and posting to these sites.

I also found it incredibly interesting that Legg Mason has individuals, such as the one Gretchen spoke of in Texas, whom actively try maliciously pursue a firm as large as Legg Mason. Incredibly, it seems this individual was most harmful when he didn’t get his way and he began posting harmful information about Legg Mason on the Legg Mason Wikipedia page. Unfortunately, firms today must take an extremely active role in combating mere individuals in the ever-expanding space that is the internet.

Finally, Gretchen spoke about the importance of being multilingual. In all of my positions, there have always been situations in which I wished I could speak another language. Especially in intellectual property, where interpreting trademark and patent laws and precedents abroad is of paramount importance, being multilingual is truly a vital asset. Since Gretchen’s visit, I have decided to begin learning Spanish as a first step.