Andrew Prozes

Director, Reed Elsevier plc, and Chief Executive Officer
LexisNexis Group

Andrew Prozes serves on the Board of Directors of Reed Elsevier plc, and since 2000 has served as the Chief Executive Officer for Reed Elsevier’s LexisNexis Group. His long career spans two career paths: the first half as entrepreneur, and the second half transforming mature companies. This breadth of experience makes him a compelling speaker on a range of executive topics: globalization and the legal profession, the Rule of Law, lawyer as technologist, and the digitization of justice.

As chief executive of LexisNexis, Andy has taken a company with virtually one product—research—and turned it into a globally managed and now highly profitable solutions provider with over $3 billion in revenues. Today, LexisNexis is working to seamlessly support law firms around the world with total solutions that manage virtually every aspect of the legal process.

Prior to joining Reed Elsevier, Andy served as Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of West Group, part of the Thomson Corporation, where he was highly successful in moving customers from print to the then new world of online. Much earlier, as a young entrepreneur, he developed systems and services that became the de facto standard for certain aspects of Canada’s financial industry.

Today, Andy is a Director of the Cott Corporation, the world’s fourth-largest beverage producer. He is an Executive Board Member of the American Bar Association Central European and Eurasian Law Initiative (CEELI), a Board Member of The Atlantic Council of the United States, and a Director of The Bruce Museum of Arts and Technology in Greenwich, Connecticut.

Andy holds a Bachelor of Mathematics from the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, and an MBA from Ontario’s York University.

Kurt P. Sanford

President, Global Operations
LexisNexis Group

Kurt Sanford is President, Global Operations for LexisNexis Group since January 2008. He is responsible for overall global oversight and management of product development, editorial and production, customer support and infrastructure.

Previously, he was President and Chief Executive Officer of U.S. Corporate and Public Markets for LexisNexis Group Where he was responsible for LexisNexis U.S. business, government and academic markets encompassing information professionals, corporate and government attorneys, CIOs and strategic planners, as well as other knowledge workers. His organization also included the LexisNexis® Risk & Information Analytics Group that serves the anti-fraud, debt recovery, customer development, intelligence analysis and screening needs of commercial and government customers.

Earlier, Mr. Sanford served as CEO of LexisNexis Asia Pacific and as the Senior Vice President for the LexisNexis Large Law Firm Markets in the United States. He has also held other senior roles with LexisNexis, including strategy and business development. Mr. Sanford previously worked as a consultant for Bain and Company, a global business strategy consulting firm specializing in making companies more valuable. At Bain, he worked with technology, telecommunications, consumer products and financial service firms to develop growth strategies and capabilities. Prior to that, he was a vice president of a diversified financial services firm and also served on active duty in the United States Army as a Captain and member of the Judge Advocate General's Corps.

Mr. Sanford earned an MBA, with distinction, from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and received his JD, with honors, from Suffolk University Law School in Boston, Massachusetts. He also graduated with a BA in Economics from the University of Notre Dame.

Mike Walsh

President and CEO, U.S. Legal Markets (USLM)
CEO, Global Solutions

Mike Walsh is president and CEO of U.S. Legal Markets. Mike, who is located in New York City, joined LexisNexis two years ago as senior vice president, Global Strategy and Business Development. He most recently held the title of senior vice president Large Law markets.

Walsh has a Bachelor of Arts from Yale University and a Juris Doctor degree from Harvard Law School. He served as an associate for Weil, Gotshal and Manges in Washington, D.C., and was seconded to General Electric, working on the restructuring of GE India and GE Capital Corporation in France. Walsh also worked at Boston Consulting Group for three years.

Walsh co-founded Infirmation.com, a portal for lawyers comprised of message boards for the legal community, a law firm directory, career advice forum, legal jobs database and job placement service. Infirmation.com became one of the foundations of Findlaw, where Walsh served as vice president of Strategy.

Prior to joining LexisNexis Group, Walsh was director, Strategic Business Development for Home Depot. He was responsible for strategy and business development for Home Depot Supply, the company’s new growth business division.

Judy Vezmar

CEO LexisNexis Europe
Canada, Latin America and Africa

Judy Vezmar is currently Chief Executive Officer of LexisNexis Group ECLA. LexisNexis is a worldwide leader in legal and News & Business information and is a division of the global media group Reed Elsevier plc.

Ms. Vezmar is responsible for LexisNexis business units in the United Kingdom, continental Europe, Canada, Africa and Latin America. Those business units include LexisNexis Butterworths UK, LexisNexis France Juris Classeur and LexisNexis in Poland, Austria, Germany, Netherlands, Canada, South Africa, Argentina, Chile and Mexico. She is based in London.

Ms. Vezmar joined LexisNexis from Xerox Corporation where she held various roles including senior vice president & general manager of Financial Services Industry, Xerox Europe. Ms. Vezmar and her team developed and implemented a highly successful strategy to provide industry-focused, full-service solutions to the European financial services industry. Previously, she held various senior positions in the U.S., including VPGM, head of strategy and planning and various marketing and sales leadership roles.

Ms. Vezmar holds an MBA from Columbia University and a Bachelor of Science degree in business and marketing from Marian College, Butler University.

Doug Kaplan

CEO, Asia Pacific
LexisNexis Group

Doug Kaplan is Chief Executive Officer of LexisNexis Asia Pacific. He is responsible for developing strategies to expand the adoption of on-line information-based products and services, including e-filing and practice management solutions that further the company’s strong growth in the region.

A 20-year veteran in media and technology in Asia Pacific, Kaplan was previously President, Asia for RealNetworks, where he was responsible for expanding their footprint across the region while driving new consumer product launches in Japan, China, Singapore, Australia, and Korea. Prior to RealNetworks, Kaplan held management positions with technology and information businesses in both the U.S. and Asia, including leadership roles with Fatwire, Divine, Denalii, NetGravity, Nikkei Business Publications, and CMP Asia.

Kaplan is based in Singapore and reports directly to the Chief Executive Officer of LexisNexis Group.

Kaplan has extensive experience working throughout Asia and is bilingual in English and Japanese, with conversational Korean, French and German. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics and Asian Studies from the University of California (Berkeley).

Robert Rigby-Hall

Senior Vice President, Global Human Resources
LexisNexis Group

With fifteen years experience in consulting, consumer goods and business-to-business markets, Robert Rigby-Hall is responsible for all of the LexisNexis HR, internal communications and corporate social responsibilities activities, a role that feeds the success of 13,500 people in more than 26 countries. A Human resources leader who combines emotional intelligence with a keen numbers focus, he has a zeal for the details of execution. His unique breadth of experience, in both HR and operating roles, explains why he works so closely with LexisNexis executives on everything from strategy, to global people initiatives, to hands-on execution.

Joining LexisNexis in 2004, Robert has been instrumental in helping lead the company in making the critical shift from a research and products focus to a solutions focus. Prior to LexisNexis, Robert worked in sister division-Reed Business. Here, after a steady rise through various senior HR roles, he had his first exposure to an operating role when, between 2002 and 2003, he was the Interim President of Reed Exhibitions North America, a $180m revenue business based in Connecticut, USA.

Prior to Reed Exhibitions, Robert held a variety of Human Resources roles in the international headquarters of Hasbro, Inc. With 3,000 employees throughout Europe, Asia Pacific, and emerging markets, Hasbro is the worldwide leader in the design, manufacture and marketing of toys, games and interactive products. As a proving ground, Hasbro not only gave Robert product and global experience, but deep experience in the most critical HR competencies: compensation and benefits, generalist HR, training and management development.

Robert gained his first HR experience as a consultant with a major European employee benefits and HR consulting business. This role involved yet another competency that has served him well in his career: Sales. When added to his HR experience-compensation and benefits, international HR, expatriates, training, management development, recruitment, communications and change management-it suggests what Robert sees as the fundamental journey the HR professional must make in the 21st century: Namely, to take HR from a support role to a key strategic partner directly wired into the business.

Today, Robert is a member of both the UK Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development and the American Society for Human Resource Management. His broad experience also includes Board Director of a non-government training organization, as well as his experience on the Advisory Board of a global HR consulting business.

Joanna Stone

Senior Vice President, Global Strategy & Business Development
LexisNexis Group

Joanna Stone is Senior Vice President of Global Strategy and Business Development for LexisNexis Group. She is responsible for developing global strategy, as well as overseeing the strategic aspects of business development and acquisitions. Stone was promoted to the position in September 2007 after serving as the head of Strategy of LexisNexis U.S. Corporate and Public Markets.

Prior to joining LexisNexis in 2006, Stone was the Executive Vice President of Business Development for the Thomson Financial Corporate Group where she oversaw strategic planning, acquisitions and partnerships. During her time at Thomson Financial, Stone led efforts to offshore research staff to Manila resulting in improved margins, managed large channel partnership relationships, and founded the company's Innovation Program, EDGE (Employee Driven Growth Engine).

Stone has also served as director of strategic planning at Dow Jones & Company, where she developed the initial business case for the Saturday Edition of The Wall Street Journal. Before that, she worked for Accenture and Time Warner. In addition, Stone has written articles for The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, The Washington Post, The New York Daily News and People Magazine.

Stone serves on the board of Pop & Politics, a nonprofit organization that encourages civic engagement in youth while training future political journalists. In 1997, she co-founded Montage Entertainment, Inc., a non-profit that encouraged diversity in media through mentoring youth.

Stone earned a bachelor's degree and master's degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She also earned a Master's in Business Administration from Harvard University. She lives in New York City with her husband.

Ken Thompson

Senior Vice President, Global Chief Legal Officer
LexisNexis Group

As LexisNexis Global Chief Legal Officer, Ken Thompson has transformed the culture of the company's in-house corporate counsel function. In the process, he has taken the office from a distant advisory wing to a legal services organization, trusted by leadership and deeply embedded in the company's day-to-day operations. The result has significantly raised commitment and job satisfaction for the legal team, which rates near the top in employee satisfaction surveys. The reason is simple. Ken's emphasis on a business perspective has enabled the company's lawyers to operate at a much more strategic level-not just as lawyers, but rather as business advisors, free to challenge and ask the right questions.

In 2001, Ken Joined LexisNexis as a partner from a Cincinnati law firm where he had built a substantial practice. At the time, LexisNexis was aggressively moving toward solutions, so Ken came in as Assistant General Counsel managing the LexisNexis Content Acquisition group charged with acquiring the pieces needed to build those solutions. In particular, Ken concentrated in complex content acquisitions, intellectual property issues, and mergers and acquisitions.

Two years later, Ken took over legal Intellectual Property and was promoted to Deputy General Counsel. Several years later, he was again promoted, first to acting Chief Legal Officer, U.S., then, a year ago, to Global Chief Legal Officer. In his role as Global CLO, Ken continues to focus on his core areas of expertise: intellectual property, acquisitions and divestiture, anti-trust, and Internet security issues. Indeed, in line with his security focus, the Chief Security Officer now reports to Ken, overseeing the governance and protection of the vast quantities of information that LexisNexis gathers and stores. Today, as a member of the LexisNexis Group Management Committee, Ken leads and advises at the highest levels of the company. He also remains the principal legal advisor to the LexisNexis Global Chief Executive Officer.

Prior to joining LexisNexis, for more than 15 years, Ken was a partner in a highly respected Cincinnati, Ohio, law firm. Here he rose quickly, taking five years to make partner and only eight to become a member of the executive committee, and all while building a large business, much of it in the technology sector. In the process, Ken was admitted to practice in Ohio and Kentucky. He also came before the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, and the U.S. Tax Court.

Ken is a past chair of the Ohio State Bar Association's Computer and High Technology Law Committee, where he did ground-breaking work on the work-made-for-hire doctrine, as well as the state's white collar computer crime laws, then in their infancy. In addition, Ken is a former member of the Ohio State Bar Association Intellectual Property Section Board of Governors, and a former member of the Ohio State Bar Association's Council of Delegates.

Ken has a B.A. degree from Capital University and a JD from the University of Cincinnati College of Law. His broad expertise makes him an authoritative and highly engaging public speaker on a range of issues: intellectual property, acquisitions and divestitures, anti-trust, and Internet security.

Carolyn Ullerick

Global Chief Financial Officer
LexisNexis Group

Carolyn Ullerick joined LexisNexis as CFO in 2000.  She has successfully focused on revenue and profit drivers to ensure delivery of the company’s goals while driving above-market growth. Ms. Ullerick pushes the boundaries of the traditional CFO role, involving herself in strategy, operations, systems, people issues, and more.

Carolyn is also the company’s “Chief M&A Officer,” helping to target and vet numerous acquisitions and helping LexisNexis to extend its lead in legal, corporate, government and risk solutions. In this capacity, she plays a pivotal role in the development and execution of the company’s solutions strategy through early portfolio analysis, market attractiveness assessments and investment and acquisition strategies.

Carolyn brings to LexisNexis wide-ranging experience from a number of industries including publishing, media, technology, and packaged goods.  She came to LexisNexis from Hostess Frito-Lay, a division of PepsiCo, where she was CFO of the Canadian operations.  In her capacity there, Ms. Ullerick was instrumental in restructuring product pricing and sizing, as well as the delivery trade spend, and affecting an increase in productivity to create 20 percent compounded annual growth.

Prior to PepsiCo, Carolyn was VP of finance for the Southam Newspaper Group in Toronto where she provided financial guidance to the CEO and CFO.  Among other highlights, she implemented a successful three-year strategic planning process, with a heavy emphasis on growth strategies, and a corresponding effort to streamline non-core activities.

Before joining Southam Newspaper Group, Ms. Ullerick held increasingly senior financial positions with the Wireless Group of Northern Telecom, Corporate Audit and FP&A for the London Free press a division of The Blackburn Media Group, and Internal Audit for Scott’s Hospitality.

A practiced speaker, Carolyn brings authority to many themes including Creating Performance Cultures, The CFO as Business Partner, Making the M&A Process Work, Women and Numbers, and Investment Sharp Shooting.

Ms. Ullerick received a BA in Finance from the University of Western Ontario, Canada’s premier Business School. She also holds a CMA in accounting.

Jeff Whittle

Senior Vice President Global Product Officer
LexisNexis Group

Jeff Whittle joined LexisNexis in October 2005 from IMS Health where he was responsible for Global Production and Development for the Americas. He joined IMS Health in May 1998 as vice president of Systems Integration Operations. In 1998 he became senior vice president of Systems Operations, responsible for U.S. production, development and implementation of information products, the associated databases, the technology infrastructure, and client services. He acquired responsibility for the U.S. sales, marketing, market research services and supplier management functions in March 2000. In December 2000, Whittle was given responsibility for global production.

Whittle has directed development of many new products, a number of technology and quality advancements including: virtual private networking to support the company’s Internet applications, infrastructure improvements to significantly reduce operational costs, and a Six Sigma quality improvement project resulting in $2 million of incremental revenues in one year. In March 2002, IMS received the Compass 2001 Data Center of the Year Award.

Whittle joined IMS HEALTH from the Boston Consulting Group where he was Chief Information Officer. In that role, he directed the replacement of all major systems and introduced technology improvements to support the company’s expansion from 26 to 44 offices. Improvements included a knowledge management system using Internet and relational technology and a worldwide telecommunications system with a breakthrough outsourcing approach.

Prior to joining the Boston Consulting Group, he spent twelve years at CSC Consulting as a partner and senior project manager leading diverse technology projects. His clients included large utility companies, a state government, an insurance company, a mutual fund company, a software company, a computer hardware manufacturer and other systems integration companies. Whittle has also worked in technology roles at Cullinet and EDS.

Whittle earned a BS in Mathematics from Emory University.

James M. Peck

Chief Executive Officer
LexisNexis Risk & Information Analytics Group

James M. Peck is Chief Executive Officer of Risk & Information Analytics Group for the LexisNexis Group. He started with the business unit in March 2004 with responsibility for driving revenue and merging market needs with technology solutions. Peck facilitated the 2004 Seisint acquisition and integration into LexisNexis Risk & Information Analytics Group business unit. Under Peck's leadership, the business unit has achieved consistent double-digit growth and significant margin improvements.

Previously, Peck was Senior Vice President and Chief Product Officer of the Global Electronic Product Development Organization for LexisNexis. He was responsible for product development and online solutions to serve global markets. He was appointed to this position in October 2001.

Prior to 2001, Peck was the Senior Vice President of Product Development with Celera Genomics, a bio-technology firm. After joining Celera in 1999, Peck led the construction of a new online system containing information about human genetics deployed in task-based applications for research scientists, delivered via the Internet. He spearheaded the creation of their product development group and increased revenue by more than 100% in fiscal year 2001.

Peck previously spent a decade at LexisNexis as an engineer, then manager and director in building data and operating editorial systems. In 1997, Peck joined Lexis® Online Publishing to head product design. As Vice-President of product development, he led the teams that designed and built all the components of the lexis.com® research system, including Core Terms, Search Advisor, Core Concepts, case law summaries, and legislative linking. Peck also headed creation of a new editorial publishing system for the summaries and launched the summaries operations that now employ 700 full-time lawyer-editors.

Peck earned his bachelor's degree at the University of Dayton in management information systems, and a master's in business administration from The Ohio State University.

Henry Z. Horbaczewski

Senior Vice President, General Counsel
Reed Elsevier Inc.

Henry Z. Horbaczewski is Senior Vice President and General Counsel of Reed Elsevier Inc. Based in New York City, Reed Elsevier Inc. is the principal U.S. subsidiary of the Reed Elsevier group, an international publisher and information services provider for the legal profession, science, business, technology and medicine. Mr. Horbaczewski practices intellectual property, commercial and corporate transactional law. Prior to joining Reed Elsevier, he was a partner at Coudert Brothers in New York City.

Mr. Horbaczewski is a member of the American Bar Association, International Bar Association and the Association of the Bar of the City of New York and admitted to the bars of Massachusetts and New York. He is a member of the ABA Sections on Intellectual Property Law, Business Law and Labor and Employment Law.

Mr. Horbaczewski has written about intellectual property law and spoken to the American Bar Association, the Association of American Publishers, American Business Media and the International Publishers Association about it.

He received his J.D. from Harvard University in 1975; his B.A., magna cum laude, in 1972 from Harvard College, where he was Phi Beta Kappa.
 
 

Mark Popolano

Chief Technology Officer
Reed Elsevier

Mark Popolano joined Reed Elsevier as Chief Technology Officer in March, 2007.  He reports to Reed Elsevier Chief Executive Sir Crispin Davis and is based in New York City.  Mark is also a member of the Reed Elsevier Management Committee.

Mark joined Reed Elsevier from the Fortune 10 insurance organization American International Group (AIG) where he held the top technology position of Corporate Senior Vice President and Global Chief Information Officer.

Mark is a recipient of numerous industry awards including the BearingPoint/Forbes Compass Award for Strategic Direction, the 2001 Insurance and Technology Elite and as one of CIO Forum’s Top 25 Financial Service CIO’s in New York.  Mark also serves as a mentor for second semester students of the Columbia University Executive Master of Science in Technology Management program.