Kate is chair of the firm’s food and beverage industry group. She regularly advises global beverage and food companies on a variety of transactional topics. In addition, she counsels many companies with their domestic and international procurement and supply chain needs by ensuring clients have strong contractual relationships and strategic partnering arrangements with their vendors and customers. Kate’s five-years’ in-house experience at an S&P 500 company gives her deep insight into her clients’ needs, priorities and goals from both legal and business perspectives. She routinely structures and negotiates complex commercial transactions involving acquisition of raw materials, components, goods and services; supply and manufacturing; disposition of assets; intellectual property development and licensing; outsourcing of non-core business functions; logistics and warehousing; risk management; boilerplate form development, design and web-based implementation; sales, reseller and distribution agreements; marketing, advertising, sponsorship and promotion arrangements; telecommunications; wireless and dedicated access; and professional services. Because technology is a critical function of a business’ supply chain, she regularly drafts and negotiates numerous types of technology agreements, from both the vendor and the licensee perspective, including those related to patent, source code and open source license agreements; collocation; hosting; escrow; maintenance and support; and virtualization.