Matt Cooper
General Counsel
Capital One Financial Corporation
Matt Cooper is General Counsel of Capital One Financial Corporation, and is a member of the company’s Executive Committee. Cooper leads a legal department of 350 attorneys and legal professionals in 11 offices supporting all of Capital One’s lines of business worldwide.
Cooper joined Capital One in January 2009. Before assuming the role of General Counsel in 2018, he held various leadership roles within Capital One’s Legal Department, including serving as the Head of Litigation and as Chief Counsel for the company’s Global Credit Card Division. Prior to joining Capital One, Cooper held executive positions in the legal department of General Electric Company, and served as Deputy General Counsel of Genworth Financial. Cooper joined GE from McGuireWoods LLP.
Cooper serves on the boards of several community organizations, including the Leadership Council for Legal Diversity and Venture Richmond.
Cooper earned a B.A. with High Honors and a J.D. from the University of Virginia, and clerked for The Honorable David M. Ebel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.
Capital One’s Legal Department joined PBI’s Corporate Pro Bono Challenge® initiative in 2012. Since its pro bono committee was formed in 2011, Capital One’s roughly 350 legal professionals have donated more than 16,000 hours of pro bono service in local communities from offices in the Washington, D.C., Richmond, New York, Dallas, Chicago, San Francisco, New Orleans, and Las Vegas metropolitan areas. Examples of the legal department’s current pro bono initiatives include:
JusticeServer and JusticeServer 2.0
At the inaugural Supreme Court of Virginia Pro Bono Summit in 2010, Capital One’s General Counsel pledged to provide in-kind pro bono contributions from both its Legal and Technology Departments in order to facilitate efforts to bridge the “access to justice gap” in its home state of Virginia and beyond. In 2011, Capital One’s Legal Department hosted a gathering of regional pro bono leaders at its Richmond campus and announced a seed grant for the development of a new software program that could serve as both (1) a new case management system for resource-constrained legal aid organizations in Central Virginia, and (2) a portal to connect volunteer attorneys from the private sector with pro bono legal aid clients, thus enabling “distance pro bono lawyering.” National and regional law firms and other corporate legal departments matched Capital One’s seed grant, and over the course of just a few days raised several hundred thousand dollars to fund the development of a new state-of-the-art software tool which became JusticeServer®.
Over the next two years, Capital One lawyers and technologists worked with lawyers from the Greater Richmond Bar Foundation (GRBF), Central Virginia Legal Aid Society (CVLAS), and the Legal Aid Justice Center (LAJC) to develop JusticeServer, a cloud-based Salesforce application. The case management side of JusticeServer was launched in 2012, when CVLAS and LAJC began using it as their principal case management system, and to date, the system has been used to manage more than 35,000 legal aid cases benefitting more than 81,000 pro bono clients. The volunteer portal of JusticeServer launched in 2013, and since that time, pro bono lawyers in Virginia have used JusticeServer to provide pro bono legal services on more than 9,000 legal aid cases benefitting more than 24,000 pro bono clients on myriad civil legal matters (e.g., domestic relations, consumer law, housing, bankruptcy, employment, immigration). The system has also been used to provide pro bono legal services to hundreds of nonprofit organizations through GRBF’s Pro Bono Clearinghouse program. Today, there are more than 1,200 volunteer attorneys registered to take pro bono cases on JusticeServer.
In 2017, GRBF, CVLAS, LAJC, and Capital One selected TechBridge, a nonprofit technology development organization in Atlanta, to upgrade and enhance JusticeServer so that its portal could be used with more legal aid case management systems and deployed at scale beyond Central Virginia. In the spring of 2019, JusticeServer® 2.0 was launched, and the volunteer portal was connected with all regional legal aid organizations in Virginia. The system has since been adopted in parts of New York, and expansion to legal aid organizations in California, Massachusetts, and other jurisdictions is under consideration.
Pro Bono Clinics
Capital One attorneys and legal professionals regularly donate their time to staff a number of pro bono clinics throughout the company’s footprint, including clinics to:
Capital One’s Legal Department has also partnered with PBI’s Corporate Pro Bono team to hold four Clinic in a Box®events, most recently in April 2019.
Pro Bono Appellate Work
Over the past several years, members of Capital One’s Legal Department in McLean and Richmond have drafted briefs and argued pro bono cases in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit on behalf of prisoners contesting conditions of confinement and undocumented immigrants contesting transfers to out-of-state detention centers, in partnership with LAJC and, more recently, McGuireWoods.
Legal Volunteerism: Street Law
Three years ago, Capital One joined forces with Street Law, a nonprofit organization that creates classroom and community programs to teach students about law, democracy, and human rights, and give them the skills and confidence they need to bring about positive change.
Capital One Legal Department’s work with Street Law focuses on two initiatives: (1) the Corporate Legal Diversity Pipeline Program, in which Capital One associates visit high school students in their classrooms to educate students about the law and legal careers, and introduce them to the tools and skills necessary to prepare for college and the workforce; and (2) Legal Life Skills for Youth, which encourages young people in areas with high incidences of involvement in the juvenile justice system, aging out of foster care, or homelessness, and helps them to develop skills like conflict resolution, decision-making, communication, analytical thinking, and advocacy.
PBI is grateful to Matt for his pro bono leadership!
Amy Weaver
President, Legal and Corporate Affairs, and General Counsel
Salesfore
Amy Weaver is the President, Legal and Corporate Affairs, and General Counsel of Salesforce, and is a member of the company’s Executive Committee. Weaver leads the global legal, compliance, internal audit, corporate security, and government affairs teams at Salesforce, which she joined in 2013.
Prior to joining Salesforce, Weaver was Executive Vice President and General Counsel of Univar Inc., where she was responsible for global legal and corporate affairs. Previously, Weaver was Senior Vice President and Deputy General Counsel at Expedia, Inc. Weaver practiced law at Cravath, Swaine & Moore and at Perkins Coie. Prior to entering private practice, she served as a legislative aide to a member of the Hong Kong Legislative Council as a Luce Scholar and was a judicial clerk at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. She has a J.D. from Harvard Law School and a B.A. from Wellesley College.
Weaver has served on PBI’s Corporate Pro Bono Advisory Board since 2015 and serves on the Bay Area Local Advisory Board of Year Up, a one-year intensive training program that provides career and life skills development, college-eligible coursework, and internships to under-served young adults. She is actively involved with the World Economic Forum, is a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and is the executive sponsor for the Salesforce Women’s Network.
Since joining Salesforce, Weaver has been committed to overhauling the company’s pro bono program, surveying Salesforce’s legal team about their pro bono interests, and creating a Pro Bono Committee. Since its formal pro bono program launched in 2014, Salesforce’s legal department employees have volunteered thousands of pro bono hours.
Salesforce joined PBI’s Corporate Pro Bono Challenge® initiative in 2015, committing to use its best efforts to encourage at least one-half of its legal staff to support and participate in pro bono legal services. Pro bono is a critical part of Salesforce’s pledge to give one percent of product, one percent of resources, and one percent of employee time to supporting nonprofit causes. Examples of the legal department’s current pro bono initiatives include:
Working with Veterans
While Salesforce’s legal department has created an array of pro bono opportunities corresponding to the team’s interest areas and community needs, helping veterans is a top priority. The inaugural event after the 2014 creation of the Salesforce Pro Bono Legal Services program was Service-4-Service, a one-day event to provide free legal and social services to U.S. veterans appearing before the San Francisco Veterans Justice Court. Several entities collaborated with Salesforce to launch Service-4-Service, including the Community Justice Center of the Superior Court of San Francisco, Swords to Plowshares, the San Francisco Bar Association’s Justice and Diversity Center, and law firm partners.
Pro Bono Clinics & Special Projects
Salesforce attorneys and professionals participate in a wide range of projects, including U.S.- and international-based activities. Salesforce’s dedication to pro bono legal services is representative of the company’s overall commitment to community service and making a positive impact through volunteering. Salesforce organizes department-wide pro bono projects, including some that require physical presence in specific offices, while other projects can be done remotely. Additionally, each regional office organizes local pro bono projects with both in-person and remote components. Some of these projects include:
Global Reach
Salesforce structured its pro bono program to engage all of its lawyers around the globe. With teams of lawyers from Paris, London, Toronto, San Francisco, and New York contributing to the efforts, Salesforce partnered with Baker McKenzie to draft a toolkit for judges from the member states of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation to support the effective adjudication of terrorism cases. The practice-oriented toolkit follows customary international and human rights law and norms relating to court proceedings for terrorism offenses. A template that can be adapted by judges and judicial academies in other regions throughout the world, the toolkit was submitted to the Global Center on Cooperative Security and the United Nations Security Council Counter-Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate. Salesforce is also heavily involved with Legal Atlas for Street Youth, helping to create this online database documenting laws impacting street children across the globe. This tool will help countries improve their standards, policies, and practices concerning child rights, in keeping with the U.N. General Comment on Children in Street Situations.
PBI is grateful to Amy for her pro bono leadership!
