Mendi Sossamon

The decisions that shape a growing company are rarely only legal. Expanding into a new country, turning intellectual property into revenue, integrating an acquired business, choosing whether to build, buy, or partner: each depends as much on strategy, timing, and the people with a stake in the outcome as on the law. CEOs, CFOs, boards, private equity sponsors, and in-house legal teams turn to Mendi, many as their outside general counsel, to reconcile those forces into a plan that works today and holds up as the business scales.

Cross-border growth is a defining part of Mendi’s practice, and she co-leads PLG’s international group. For companies entering the U.S. market, she shapes how the business is structured, how it goes to market, and how the full range of U.S. legal considerations, including entity structure, commercial, IP, employment, and governance, fits into a coherent strategy. For U.S. companies expanding abroad, she draws on direct experience in more than 30 countries to assess each market’s legal risks, structure the legal aspects of the expansion, and integrate advice from vetted local counsel with the client’s overall objectives.

Companies’ use of AI is changing how they create and protect value, and their leadership teams are making decisions about AI faster than the law can settle the questions that follow. Mendi helps those teams make these decisions with the rights and risks in clear view. When a company builds products on third-party AI models, she advises on how rights in the data those models use and the outputs they generate should be allocated among the company, its customers, and the model provider. She also develops IP strategies to protect clients’ proprietary content and data against AI-enabled replication by others.

Across 27 years in large-firm practice, in her own firm, and as Deputy General Counsel at a billion-dollar public company, Mendi has sharpened an instinct for taking in the whole picture at once and seeing what will actually carry a deal or initiative to completion. She concentrates on the issues that matter rather than perfecting the ones that don’t, and keeps every stakeholder moving in the same direction without exposing the business to undue risk. Many executives who have seen her work this way have brought her with them from one company to the next. With her, legal stops being the reason things slow down.

Representative Experience

Growth Strategy and Transactions

• Advises leadership on how to add new capabilities, whether through internal development, licensing, partnership, or acquisition, and structures the path chosen.
• Guides acquisitions from structure through integration, uniting legal entities, employment arrangements, polices, governance, and commercial operations behind the combined company’s strategy.
• Prepares companies for their next stage of growth, aligning the legal side of their operations, including commercial practices, risk management, and governance, with plans for scale.
• Helps growth companies win and expand multimillion-dollar relationships with enterprises and institutions such as JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Amazon, Johnson & Johnson, and Princeton University.

Cross-Border Expansion

• Represents non-U.S. companies acquiring, investing in, or partnering with U.S. businesses, and builds U.S. operations for others, from first entity and hires to first enterprise customers.
• Leads U.S. companies into new markets, including Canada, the United Kingdom, Europe, China, Singapore, and Australia, through direct entry, acquisitions, and investments, and reshapes that footprint as strategy changes.
• Structures international operations, including each market’s operating and go-to-market model, where IP sits, how talent is engaged, and how data crosses borders.

Technology, IP, and AI

• Advises technology and IP-driven companies launching new products, services, and verticals on protecting the underlying IP and managing related risks such as infringement exposure and erosion of its value.
• Develops IP licensing strategies and models that extend the market reach of clients’ technology, content, and data while protecting the long-term value of those assets.
• Structures significant technology transactions, whether a client is acquiring capabilities through platform and development partnerships or selling its own offerings to major customers.
• Keeps clients’ intellectual property defensible as AI changes how it is created and copied, from preserving copyright in work produced with AI tools to building safeguards into proprietary content and data that reduce the risk of AI tools ingesting and reusing them.
• Designs AI governance frameworks that give leadership oversight of how their companies adopt and use AI, from which uses to approve to how confidential information and intellectual property are protected.
• Builds data privacy programs that strengthen customer trust and give growing companies a commercial edge in winning and keeping business.

Outside General Counsel and Leadership Advisory

• Serves as outside general counsel to companies without a full in-house legal department, and as a senior outside adviser to general counsel.
• Advises boards on governance and major decisions, framing the legal considerations so directors can weigh them alongside strategy and risk.
• Steers leadership through sensitive, fast-moving situations where reputation and key relationships are at stake and the right course is not yet clear.
• Leads enterprise legal risk assessments for executive teams, drawing in subject-matter specialists and turning the findings into priorities leadership can act on.
• Designs how legal supports the business across commercial, data privacy, IP, and employment matters, building the processes, playbooks, and escalation paths that let teams move quickly with risk kept in check.