Our Team
Jane Wright-Mitchell is a business and compliance lawyer with over 20 years of experience advising start-ups, public and private companies. Ms. Wright-Mitchell currently serves as Principal and General Counsel at Lecar Life Sciences, a life sciences consulting company. She provides consulting services to companies in the pharmaceutical, medical device, medical technology and cannabis industries. She was most recently the General Counsel, Chief Compliance Officer and Corporate Secretary at Vaxcyte, Inc., a publicly-traded, pre-clinical stage vaccine company. Prior to that role, Ms. Wright-Mitchell served as the Chief Legal Officer and Corporate Secretary of Steep Hill, Inc., a cannabis testing laboratory in California. Prior to joining Steep Hill, Jane served as the Chief Legal and Compliance Officer as well as Corporate Secretary for AcelRx Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a public pharmaceutical company focused on the development and commercialization of acute pain therapies. She is experienced in advising biotech companies on a broad range of matters including licensing, M&A transactions, alliance management, labor and employment issues, corporate governance including SEC reporting, regulatory compliance, clinical trial oversight, commercial launch compliance matters, IP strategy and portfolio management, litigation management, internal investigations and development of training programs. As a strategic partner, Jane actively advises senior management and the Board of Directors on these areas. A key goal is to minimize risk without impeding business objectives.
Jane holds a bachelor of science in Biological Sciences from Clemson University, a doctorate of pharmacy (PharmD) from the University of Illinois, Chicago and a juris doctorate (J.D.) from Chicago Kent College of Law. She is a registered pharmacist as well as registered to practice before the United States Patent and Trademark Office. She recently completed a certification program (2024) at Berkley Law Executive Education Center for AI in the Legal Profession.
Advisor | Board Member | Corporate Secretary | C-Suite Executive | General Counsel | Compliance Officer
Frequently Asked Questions
A fractional General Counsel, or fractional GC, is an experienced C-suite professional with in-house legal expertise and a generalist skillset who is comfortable taking on high-level roles and strategic work on a part-time or project basis as a resource to a company’s executive team. A fractional GC can work with companies to provide top-level legal advice and direction to the board or C-suite where no existing senior legal resources currently exist. They can spot risk, provide solutions and recommendations to mitigate those risks as well as identify emerging industry challenges where legal support is needed. Because of their extensive experience, they are able to provide this support in an efficient and cost-effective manner.
The need for a Fractional GC takes different forms such as:
* You may be a small company that does not yet have an internal legal department or in-house legal support.
* You may be out growing your current internal legal structure and you need to expand but aren’t sure if you want additional full-time support or even what areas to expand.
* You may be using outside legal counsel through a law firm and are finding the time commitments to manage those activities has become too burdensome, time-consuming, or costly.
* You may have legal projects, such as general contracting, that you want handled quickly and in a cost effective manner.
* You may have a specific area of law or a specific compliance concern that you want to address internally but don’t want to bring on full-time staff.
A Fractional GC can fit for all of these situations.
That’s ok! A lot of clients may not know exactly what they need, but they know they need legal or compliance support. We are happy to talk with you to help understand your current situation and help you develop a strategy to address those areas of uncertainty. Once you have a strategy it’s often easier to see what work is needed now and what can remain for future planning.
Absolutely. We can partner with your outside counsel to provide additional support to current projects or transition work internally. We have worked with a wide variety of outside law firms and have experience coordinating activities so that it’s cost effective for you.
We know cost control is important especially for legal services. We will work with you to appropriately scope projects or anticipated workload to address your specific needs whether it is a set number of hours needed per week/month or if a flat project fee would be a better fit. Transparency is important and we strive to ensure there are no billing surprises or out of budget costs. If any overages occur, we will identify those to you in advance for you to evaluate prior to incurring additional costs..