Class of 1994 Alumnus Focused Legal Career on Ever-Changing World of Data Privacy

Since 2012, Adam has been at NetApp, a data infrastructure company based in Silicon Valley that helps global companies connect, protect, and activate data across every cloud, workload, and environment. Adam’s focus is the company’s U.S. public sector legal work and he sits on the legal leadership team.

“NetApp has 12,000 employees with roughly 100 to 120 lawyers on staff supporting all different aspects of a company. I lead the team that's responsible for cybersecurity incident response, cybersecurity policy, internal AI use governance, general data protection regulation, the California Consumer Protection Act compliance, internal procurement, and our supply chain,” he said.

If there’s a cybersecurity issue — internally or for one of their clients — Adam and his team lead the response effort. 

“Data privacy is a big concern,” explained Adam. “NetApp sells the physical hardware appliances, licensed software, and SaaS services. On top of that, there’s scarcity in the market right now for the internal components required to build our products. With the AI boom, a lot of big companies are gobbling up supply. My team deals with all the negotiations with component suppliers. AI creates and utilizes volumes and volumes of data. NetApp provides storage for that data, and our solutions complement and benefit the growing AI industry.”

After graduating with a bachelor's degree in history and political science from Rutgers University and a Juris Doctorate from the University of Miami School of Law, Adam started practicing law in Miami.

“After my first year, I realized that I wanted to get more into the policy space,” recalled Adam. “So, I moved to the D.C. area, where my now wife was going to grad school at Georgetown University. It was post-911, and I started working for the Governor of Maryland and his Office of Homeland Security on the policy side.”

Adam worked with many private sector partners and businesses in the state of Maryland and that got him interested in the tech space.

“I took a job at a SaaS (small software as a service) startup that was focused on homeland security-focused software. I was general counsel at Digital Sandbox in D.C. and ran their in-house legal department for a few years. I then transitioned over to NetApp,” he said.

Not only has Adam built his career in D.C., he and his family live on Capitol Hill near the Capitol Building.

“My wife, Sarah, has worked on the Hill for years,” said Adam. “For several years, she worked for the U.S. House of Representatives and for Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey, and she is currently a managing director for a large consulting firm here in the D.C. area called FGS Global. We also have a 13-year-old girl and a 10-year-old boy, who are very active.”

Adam still stays in touch regularly with a core group of friends from under the pines and credits his Hamden Hall teachers for their lifelong lessons.

“I had a lot of great teachers at Hamden Hall, like Tom Butler and Whit Russell,” reflected Adam. “Now that it’s 30 years later, it’s not just because of what they taught, but how they taught me to think. I’ve been able to take those lessons and apply them — and their thought processes — to my undergraduate and law school studies. Those lessons affect how I work today and how I write. They really got me to take leaps forward. I attribute a lot of my success to my Hamden Hall education.”