After 17 years as an attorney specializing in executive compensation and employee benefits primarily for venture-backed technology companies, Galligan said she's "still very engaged."
The laws guiding her practice - tax, securities and employment - are constantly evolving, meaning she's eternally learning.
This past summer, she led all aspects of compensation matters for Citrix Systems Inc.'s spinoff of its GoTo business to LogMeIn Inc. in a $1.8 billion transaction. She ended up employing a complicated Reverse Morris Trust, which allows companies to spin off a pool of assets in a very tax-efficient way. She assured, it "doesn't happen every day."
While publicly traded companies do carve off parts of their business and sell them off from time to time, "often that's a very inefficient transaction," she said. "But we were able to structure this one in a way that had better results."
Working with and around a successful roster of cutting-edge tech companies, including including Okta, Ansys and Machine Zone, she said she finds personal inspiration in the innovative minds behind the businesses.
When leading the executive compensation and employee benefits matters related to the $462 million initial public offering of formerly Australia-based software company Atlassian in 2015, she said they had a novel and challenging but ultimately rewarding request: to come up with a way to structure their equity so that their employees, which are in the U.S., Australia and elsewhere around the globe, would benefit equally.
The rules around equity compensation, including stock options, are different from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, with varying tax and securities laws. In other words, there was no simple solution.
"But that was really important to Atlassian...It's a culture where they're in it together," Galligan said. So she immersed herself in the relevant international laws and came up with a plan where all employees would be compensated as equally as possible.
Galligan has advised some companies throughout their entire life cycle, which she said is really gratifying. "You learn a lot, and I really think it helps you become a better lawyer," she said.
She's worked with money transfer company Xoom since its start, overseeing its startup, finance rounds, IPO, public company compensation disclosure and eventual $890 million sale in 2015 to PayPal.
- Lila Seidman
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