Visiting Professor, Peking University School of Transnational Law
President, Corporate Lawyering Group LLC
Visiting Professor, Pericles Law School, Moscow, Russia
Chief Advisor to the Association of Corporate Counsel Certification Program 

Carole Basri is a visiting professor at Peking University School of Transnational Law since 2011, and a visiting professor at Pericles Law School since 2014. At Fordham University Law School she was an adjunct professor from 2010 to 2018 and she started the Fordham Corporate Compliance Certificate Program in 2013 and she help create at Fordham Law School the first LLM in Corporate Compliance at a U.S. law school, which was launched in 2014 with ABA approval.  Ms. Basri created the Corporate Lawyering Group LLC Corporate Compliance Certificate Program in São Paulo, Brazil, where the sixth workshop was held from April 1st to 6th , 2019. 

From 2017 to present, Ms. Basri is the chief advisor and lecturer of the Association of Corporate Counsel Certification program. From 1995 to 2011, she was an adjunct professor of Corporate Law with the University of Pennsylvania Law School and held The Grant Irey Lectureship.  She also has been an adjunct professor at New York Law School and Benjamin N. Cardozo Law School.  Ms. Basri, a Senior Fulbright Scholar, also was a visiting professor at Hebrew University Law School in March 2008 and a visiting professor at the Bar Ilan Law School in December 2017.

Ms. Basri joined the Federal Government, where she was an Assistant Counsel with the United States Senate Antitrust and Monopoly Subcommittee and an attorney with the Federal Trade Commission.  She later became in-house counsel with the advertising agency, NW Ayer Inc., and left to become an associate, first with Baker & McKenzie and then with Hall Dickler Lawler Kent and Friedman.  Ms. Basri then became in-house counsel with Maidenform Inc. and a consultant with the Perrier Group Inc. From 1994 to 2002, she was a consultant to Deloitte & Touche LLP, where she helped to create its Ethics and Compliance practice.  During this time, she also served as General Counsel of China On Line Inc. 

For over ten years, she served as co-chair of the Practicing Law Institute’s Conferences on Corporate Compliance.  She has chaired the Ethics for In-House Counsel seminar since 2004, chaired the Global Financial Crisis conference from July 2008 to 2010, and chaired and created the Ethics and Law Department Management Seminar in 2012.  She has also been Co-Chair of the Fordham University Law School Corporate Compliance Forum, which was held on April 2, 2012.

From 2010 until 2012, Ms. Basri was a Founder and Senior Vice President of B3 Legal, a national legal and compliance staffing company that provides, among other things, attorneys and compliance professionals to serve as in-house counsel attorneys and Compliance Officers at financial institutions.

In addition, she has been Executive Director of the Greater NY Chapter of the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) for over 10 years (until September 2006). She also currently serves as a member of the Executive Committee and co-chair of the Corporate Compliance Committee of the International Law and Practice Section of the New York State Bar Association; a member of the Practicing Law Institute’s Corporate General Counsel Advisory Committee; a member of the International Council, a member of the task force on the Future of the Legal Profession and the Middle East Committee at the Association of the Bar of the City of New York; past cochair of the International Legal Education and Certification Committee of the International Section of the American Bar Association; and past chair of the Middle East Committee of the International Section of the American Bar Association.

Ms. Basri is also President of the Corporate Lawyering Group LLC, which advises on corporate compliance programs.  She has created comprehensive compliance and ethics programs for major corporations, including the Dun & Bradstreet Corporation, Cendant, Benjamin Moore & Co. and Dannon Inc. These programs were all launched within nine months and, in many cases, in multiple languages and locations. She also provides advice on law department management, document retention and corporate governance issues.  Since the first Corporate Lawyering Accreditation Conference in 1999, the Corporate Lawyering Group has developed conferences and programs on corporate and international law, as well as on ethics.  She has served on the Academic Committee of the INTERPOL Anti-Corruption Academy from June 2007 until 2011, where she has worked on creating a curriculum for addressing corporate corruption.

Ms. Basri is co-author of Corporate Legal Departments (4rd edition) published by the PLI, which was translated into Chinese in 2010 by China Free Press, and the editor of International Corporate Practice, published by PLI.  She is the co-editor of eDiscovery for Corporate Counsel for West Publishing and the editor of Corporate Compliance Practice Guide: The Next Generation of Compliance, which was published by Lexis Nexis in 2009.  She is the author of two casebooks entitled Corporate Legal Departments and Corporate Compliance, which are both published by Carolina Academic Press. She is also the editor of three PLI Handbooks on the Global Financial Crisis published from 2008 to 2010 and the PLI handbook Ethics and Law Department in 2012.  She received the 2001 Lexis Nexis/ Corporate Legal Times Leadership Award and was the keynote moderator at the LegalTech West Coast Conference in June 2009 in Los Angeles, CA.

In 2003, Ms. Basri was a member of the US State Department’s “Future of Iraq” Project.  From July 2003 until July 2004, she was a member for the Coalition Provisional Authority, with the Iraqi Reconstruction Development Council (IRDC) for Ambassador Bremer in Baghdad. She worked extensively on doing business, anti-corruption, and transparency issues in Iraq. She helped draft legislation on these issues and met with all of the Ministries in Iraq. She created the “Doing Business Conference in Iraq” at the Union League in New York on December 9, 2003 and, in September 2004, she led a conference in Baghdad on transparency and anticorruption in Iraq, where she advised the Iraqi Ministry of Health.  In September 2004, she worked with the Iraqi Ministry of Health and the Iraqi Red Crescent on health and legal issues.  In September 2005, she was asked by Iraqi Prime Minister Jaafari to represent the Iraqi government in finding law firms and accounting firms to represent the Iraqi government in bringing Oil for Food litigation, and she was instrumental in obtaining the Oil for Food documents from the Iraqi Board of Supreme Auditors for the UN Commission on Oil for Food headed by Paul Volcker.

In March 2005, Ms. Basri spoke at Cairo University School of Law on anti-corruption at a conference for Chief Judges and Appellate Judges from Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine and Egypt on anti-corruption protocols. Similarly, in April 2005, she spoke on anti-corruption strategies at the Dead Sea in Jordan at a conference for 150 Iraqi women leaders sponsored by the Defense of Democracy and the U.S. State Department.  In July 2005, she spoke at the Iraqi Constitutional Convention in Southfield, Michigan, with a direct hook-up to Iraq, on constitutional issues.  In October 2005, she met with Iraqi women leaders at the U.S. State Department to discuss leadership issues in the December 15, 2005 election.  In March 2006, Ms. Basri worked in Baghdad with the Woman’s Alliance for Iraq Democracy and the Global Justice Center on gender crimes training for the Iraqi Tribunal Judges on Saddam Hussein’s case and, in November 2006, at the Dead Sea in Jordan, for a four-day conference, she continued this gender training for Iraqi tribunal judges.  Ultimately, this work was used by the judges in the Anfal case.  In January 2008, Ms. Basri spoke at the Harvard Kennedy School on Iraqi women’s issues and anti-corruption protocols.  In November 2008, she spoke at a conference sponsored by the Konrad-Adenauer Foundation in Berlin, Germany on International Law and the Middle East. In July 2009, she delivered lectures on women’s rights, anti-corruption and leadership at the Iraq Studies Institute in Beirut, Lebanon.  

In early 2008, she created and chaired the International Corporate Practice Conference at the Penn Club in New York City.  On March 31, 2008, Ms. Basri was the moderator for a PLI teleconference on the Global Financial Crisis and, on July 7, 2008, she chaired a PLI conference on the Global Financial Crisis.  On September 19, 2008, Ms. Basri moderated a session at the NY State Bar Association International Fall Meeting in Stockholm, Sweden on the Global Financial Crisis and, on September 25, 2008, she moderated a session on the Global Financial Crisis and eDiscovery at the ABA International Fall Meeting in Brussels, Belgium.  On April 17, 2009, Ms. Basri moderated and spoke on the Global Financial Crisis at the ABA Spring Meeting in Washington, D.C.

Ms. Basri is also a documentary film producer and her films have been shown at film festivals and PBS. She produced a documentary on hemophiliacs in Iraq who got AIDS through tainted blood parts.  She has advised, on a pro bono basis, a preparatory PBS production of Saddam’s trial.  She has been a commentator on the Iraqi elections and its constitution for MSNBC, CNN, FOX and Al Iraqiya TV.

Ms. Basri received at B.A. from Barnard College, Columbia University and a J.D. from the New York University School of Law. 

After dedicating 27 years to the Association of Corporate Counsel as an executive and legal counsel, in 2023, James A. Merklinger became as a consultant to the organization, in the capacity of Chief Advisor to the ACC Credentialing Institute.  He oversees the institute In-house Counsel Certification Program and its Data Steward Program, assessing law firm data security practices.

Located in Washington, DC. ACC is the world’s largest legal association dedicated exclusively to serving the interests of in-house counsel. With an international membership of more than 46,000 in-house counsel at more than 10,000 organizations in 100 countries, ACC serves as the “voice of the in-house bar” for corporate lawyers at 98 percent of the Fortune 100 and 51 percent of the Global 1000.

Having served ACC for over 20 years in a variety of key roles, Merklinger was named to the position of president of the ACC Credentialing Institute in 2017. In this role, he is responsible for establishing standards and advancing ACC’s ability to establish an in-house counsel credentialing program.  Merklinger is also responsible for leading the ACC Data Steward Program to evaluate the security profile of law firms.

Previous to his role as the Institute’s president, Merklinger served as ACC’s vice president and chief legal officer. He represented ACC on all legal issues affecting the association, including mergers with the Australian Corporate Lawyers Association, the Hong Kong In-house Counsel Association and the Corporate Counsel Middle East. Merklinger advised the organization on meeting the needs of the in-house counsel community. He had also served as ACC deputy general counsel and vice president - legal resources, overseeing the development of ACC’s array of resources to help in-house counsel do their jobs. In this position, he worked with 18 volunteer leadership committees, organized by practice areas, which contribute to the strategic development of the association’s resources and education programs. Merklinger spearheaded ACC’s regular benchmarking studies to provide members and the legal industry at large with key trends related to the in-house counsel practice and outside counsel management.

Merklinger joined ACC in 1995 as the director of legal resources and was instrumental in making the association’s membership materials available online. In 2005, Merklinger was named ACC’s director of large law programs, where he was the liaison with ACC’s largest legal departments at companies across the country, in Canada and Europe. While in the position, Merklinger helped grow ACC’s large law membership by more than 85 percent.

In addition to his non-profit legal experience,  James Merklinger served on the board of directors for the Tourette's Syndrome Association of Greater Washington, DC, the board of directors of the ACC Foundation and President of the Washington Irish.

Prior to joining ACC, he served as in-house counsel for DIAD, Inc. in Reston, Virginia. While at DIAD, he provided counsel in a variety of substantive areas, including commercial law, software licensing, disability law and issues affecting entrepreneurial development.

Merklinger has served as faculty for CLE programs throughout the United States, Canada , Europe and the Middle East on a variety of in-house topics

EDUCATION

Mr. Merklinger graduated from Wofford College and the University of South Carolina School of Law.

ARTICLES

1. Corporate Counsel Business Journal, “ACC and Dubai Join Forces on Anticorruption Program", (July/August 2017)
2. Law360, “A Snapshot of the Anti-Bribery Enforcement Landscape,” https://www.law360.com/article... 
3. Global Legal Post, “Doing Business in Africa,” http:// www.globallegalpost.com/corpor...
4. Law360, “As Legal Profession Evolves, GCs Outpace the Norm,” https://www.law360.com/article...
5. Law360, “3 In-house Management Strategies for 2015,” http://www.law360.com/corporat... pk=3f70063f-5b6a-4fe2-a1e7-36099623f3d1&utm_ source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_ campaign=corporate
6. Law360, “Compliance Reigns Supreme as In-house Demographic Shift,” http://www.law360.com/ corporate/articles/565307?nl_pk=3f70063f-5b6a4fe2a1e736099623f3d1&utm_source=newsletter&utm_ medium=email&utm_campaign=corporate
7. Global Legal Post, “In-house: Are You Moving Up or Out?” http://www.globallegalpost.com...