Experience:

Rick began his legal career at Hogan & Hartson (now Hogan Lovells) in Washington, D.C. assisting Fortune 500 clients with high-profile mergers and acquisitions and public company securities matters. The birth of Rick’s first child brought him back to North Carolina where he worked with Smith Anderson and Kilpatrick Stockton (now Kilpatrick Townsend) on a broad range of matters relating to both public and private high-growth technology companies, including over $3 billion in mergers and acquisitions transactions and dozens of venture capital financings.

In 2005 Rick’s longtime love for computers and open source lead him to join Red Hat, where he worked for 12 years helping grow the company from around 800 to over 10,000 employees and revenues in excess of $2 billion. During that time he served as Red Hat’s primary inside counsel on a wide variety of matters including Red Hat’s public company securities filings and annual stockholders’ meetings, multiple domestic and international mergers and acquisitions (including Red Hat’s purchase of JBoss for over $300 million), negotiating customer and vendor contracts with values up to $30 million, Red Hat’s compliance and ethics program, its data privacy and security efforts, as well as working in Singapore during a portion of 2009 to manage Red Hat’s legal function in Asia-Pacific.

In 2017, Rick left Red Hat to become General Counsel at PrecisionHawk, a drone services and software company, eventually also taking on the role of SVP of Operations and managing a team of 40.  During his four years at PrecisionHawk Rick managed all legal matters, as well as completed over $110 million in equity and debt financing, five acquisitions, and numerous complex strategic partnerships.

Education:

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Law School, 1997 :: North Carolina Law Review, Publication Editor

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1994 :: B.A., International Studies