Counsel for the decisions that shape the company.

Strategic advisory is the counsel work that does not fit inside a contract review. I work with senior leadership and boards on governance, decision ownership, and accountability: how the organization is actually structured, where its decisions live, and where the exposure sits when circumstances change. Sometimes the trigger is growth, sometimes a change in ownership or leadership, and increasingly it is AI, but the discipline is the same in each case.

Why governance is the entry point

Governance is where this work starts because governance surfaces what the organization actually does. It shows where decisions live, who owns them, and where the exposure is when the work changes. You cannot reason clearly about any major change to a company until you can see how the company runs today, and most leadership teams discover in that exercise that the gap between what they approved and what is actually running is wider than they expected. Closing that gap is the first deliverable, and it is usually the most clarifying.

The AI question

AI is the structural question most boards are facing right now, and my background is legal, which means I think in terms of accountability, decision ownership, and what happens when things go wrong. That is exactly the right lens for it. The governance frameworks are still being written, the liability standards are still being set, and the organizations that move deliberately are the ones that decided in advance who owns the decision when an AI system is in the loop. I help leadership make those decisions before an incident forces the question. For hands-on AI governance consulting and implementation, that work has its own home at Dersco LLC.

Where my experience lies

Energy and manufacturing are where most of my experience lies, having served as in-house counsel to a global manufacturer and as an owner-operator in oil and gas, so I understand regulated, operationally complex businesses from the inside. The strategic question, though, is the same across industries, and the work travels. What changes is the specific exposure, the regulatory backdrop, and the pace at which the organization can absorb change.

How the work is delivered

This is advisory work, shaped to the company rather than packaged into a fixed product. It can begin as a focused engagement with the board or executive team, a governance review that maps decision ownership and exposure, or an ongoing advisory relationship as the organization works through a transition. The right shape depends on where you are and what you are trying to decide, and the first conversation is where we figure that out.