Lawrence Jacobs
Senior Executive Vice President & Group General Counsel
News Corporation

Lon Jacobs is Senior Executive Vice President and Group General Counsel of News Corporation, one of the world’s largest media companies. Mr. Jacobs is also a member of the Office of the Chairman of News Corporation and General Counsel of Fox Entertainment Group, which is wholly owned by News Corporation.

Mr. Jacobs previously held the position of Executive Vice President and Deputy General Counsel of News Corporation. He joined News Corporation in 1996 as Senior Vice President and Deputy General Counsel.

Mr. Jacobs began his career at Squadron, Ellenoff, Plesent & Sheinfeld, (merged with Hogan and Hartson in 2002), where he was a partner from 1991 until 1996.

Mr. Jacobs serves on the Board of Directors of NDS Group, plc. and is the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Cooke Center for Learning and Development in New York City.

He is a graduate of Temple University summa cum laude and the Brooklyn Law School cum laude, where he was also a member of Law Review.

Mr. Jacobs lives in Manhattan with his wife and two daughters.

David G. Leitch
Group Vice President and General Counsel
Ford Motor Company

David G. Leitch is general counsel and a group vice president of Ford Motor Company. Immediately prior to joining Ford, Leitch served in the White House as Deputy Counsel to President George W. Bush. In that capacity, he advised the President and his staff on a variety of legal issues, including issues involving the war on terror, judicial nominations, legislative proposals and ethics.

From June 2001 through December 2002, Leitch served as Chief Counsel for the Federal Aviation Administration, overseeing a staff of 290 in Washington and the agency's 11 regional offices. He is also a past deputy assistant attorney general in the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Legal Counsel.

Leitch's law career includes serving as law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, as a law clerk to Circuit Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, III, and as a partner in the Washington, D.C. law firm of Hogan & Hartson, L.L.P. Leitch is a graduate of the University of Virginia School of Law, where he graduated first in his class, and received his undergraduate degree from Duke University.

Peter Lurie
General Counsel & Founder
Virgin Mobile USA

Peter Lurie is general counsel of Virgin Mobile USA, and, as co-founder, he played a key role in the formation and launch of the company. He has broad management and strategic responsibilities, and he focuses on negotiating relationships with key partners, including major media—he has structured some of the more innovative deals in the digital media—retail, technology, financial and manufacturing companies. He has played a critical role in guiding the company from the start-up phase, through its national launch and subsequently rapid growth, the completion of several capital transactions and an initial public offering.

Previously, Lurie served as principal of a private equity group for a German bank, which completed the first public offering of a private equity fund of funds in Europe. Prior to that, he worked on mergers & acquisitions and private equity transactions at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett. Lurie is a graduate of Dartmouth College and The University of Chicago Law School, where he was an editor of The University of Chicago Law Review.

Roger Martella
Partner, Sidley Austin LLP
and
Former General Counsel, United States Environmental Protection Agency

Mr. Martella was unanimously confirmed by the United States Senate as EPA General Counsel. In that role, Mr. Martella served as EPA’s chief legal advisor supervising an office of 350 attorneys and staff in Washington and 10 regional offices. In particular, Mr. Martella lead the team responsible for developing for the first time under the Clean Air Act the federal government’s climate change legal framework and options in response to the landmark Supreme Court decision Massachusetts v. EPA, which held greenhouse gases to be air pollutants under the Clean Air Act. His efforts included developing a full range of legal options for decision makers related to greenhouse gas regulation, alternative and renewable fuels, the development of regulatory carbon sequestration controls, and the intersection of climate change and natural resource issues including the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act. Recognized for his knowledge on legal approaches to addressing climate change, Mr. Martella focuses specifically on dissecting the extraordinarily complex and interrelated ramifications of climate change on numerous provisions of the Clean Air Act relating to mobile and stationary sources, as well as other laws, such as the ESA and NEPA. Mr. Martella’s experience in this area enables him to work to forecast for clients the likelihood of upcoming regulations and controls in the area of climate change, clean energy, and sustainability, and to develop strategic approaches to be best prepared for such controls. Mr. Martella also focuses on international climate issues, working with Chinese institutes on climate and clean energy issues and advocating for conformity between United States climate rules with the European Union. Since the April 2007 Massachusetts decision, Mr. Martella has been invited to address climate change regulation more than twenty five times in the United States and abroad.

Recognizing deficiencies in the China environmental law framework and the challenges for multinational organizations in understanding the laws on the books, Mr. Martella created the China Environmental Law Initiative in 2007. As part of the initiative, Mr. Martella created the only known website devoted to China environmental laws and organized with the State Environmental Protection Agency (now the Ministry of Environmental Protection) two separate symposia in China. Mr. Martella has served as a visiting professor at the Environmental Law Institute of Wuhan University and the State Environmental Protection Agency, and at Tsinghua University, working with academics, officials and students on developing environmental law frameworks for China. Mr. Martella has testified as an expert on this issue before the United States Congress, worked with numerous government officials at the national and provincial level in China, and has lectured with academics and students at leading universities and think tanks in both nations.

Mr. Martella graduated from Vanderbilt Law School, where he was Editor in Chief of the Vanderbilt Law Review, and Cornell University, where he studied environmental science. Following law school, he clerked for the Hon. David M. Ebel of the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Mr. Martella, elected at large to the Warrenton, VA, Town Council, devotes significant effort to public service in his community and was recognized in 2006 as Citizen of the Year by the Fauquier County Board of Supervisors for his public service and volunteerism efforts.

Carol Ann Petren
Executive Vice President & General Counsel
CIGNA Corporation

Carol Ann Petren was named Executive Vice President and General Counsel of CIGNA Corporation in May 2006 and is responsible for the company’s legal and public affairs activities.

Prior to joining CIGNA, Petren served as senior vice president and deputy general counsel of MCI, responsible for litigation, domestic and international regulatory matters, employment law, government affairs, and compliance. Before MCI, Petren served as deputy general counsel at Sears, Roebuck and Co., following 18 years in litigation defense practice with law firms in Washington, DC. Earlier in her career, she served as a prosecutor in Jackson County, MO., as Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Missouri and as counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Standards of Official Conduct.

Petren is a magna cum laude graduate of Boston College and received her J.D. and L.L.M. degrees from the University Of Missouri School Of Law.