Senior Staff
All consultants employed by Compliance & Competition Consultants, LLC, bring practical, business-oriented skills, to enable you to complete your compliance project on time and on budget. The senior staff, shown below, all have many years of experience in the corporate world, so you don’t need to worry about projects that struggle due to an excessively academic or legalistic orientation that results in a work product that will never work in the real world.
Theodore (Ted) Banks,
President
Ted is a leading authority on corporate compliance programs and antitrust law. For more than 30 years as an in-house attorney and compliance leader, he worked to make sure that compliance and ethics messages were delivered effectively to employees. He has helped develop corporate codes of conduct, on-line training systems, specific compliance policies and programs, risk assessments, and employee surveys, among other compliance tools. Since the 1970s, he has pioneered the use of computer technology for all aspects of the legal practice, including compliance training, tracking and monitoring.
His approach to training and communications has been widely recognized, and he is in demand as a speaker at training sessions for lawyers and compliance officers. He has written numerous books and articles in the area, including the Corporate Legal Compliance Handbook, published by Aspen/Wolters-Kluwer. In the antitrust area, Ted had demonstrated a unique ability to understand the business needs of clients and work with them to develop sales, marketing, or acquisition programs that are both effective and legal. He has been recognized as a “Star of the In-House Competition Bar,” has been recognized as a Master of the University of Denver Sturm College of Law, and is a recipient of the President’s Volunteer Service Award for his work with nonprofit environmental organizations. Ted was recognized as a Governance, Risk & Compliance Trailblazer and Pioneer by the National Law Journal.
Seth Eisner, J.D., Ph. D.
Senior Consultant
Seth brings to Compliance & Competition Consultants his considerable knowledge from a distinguished career in private law practice and as a vice president in the Law and Compliance Department at Kraft Foods. In addition to real-world experience in diverse legal areas including environmental, employment, intellectual property, antitrust and securities law, he used his advanced academic training in English to prepare employee training and communication materials that turned complex legal subjects into clear, concise, and relevant messages that employees enthusiastically accepted. During his career at Kraft, he engineered turnarounds at large business units whose sub-par compliance and legal performance was disrupting leadership and undermining results. Seth’s experience and common sense can assist in managing challenging litigation situations to a satisfactory and cost-effective conclusion.
Sarena Green, M.S.
Senior Consultant
Sarena has over 20 years experience writing, editing, and preparing various types of documents for business – all with the unique ability to take complex, technical subjects and make them usable by employees. Taking legal jargon and translating it into employee-friendly language is a specialty, whether it is the re-write of a policy drafted by lawyers, or taking obscure language from the Code of Federal Regulations and creating an understandable employee technical manual that was essential to assure legal compliance. She has worked for companies in the pharmaceutical, medical device, computer, and financial services industries. Her clients have ranged from not-for-profit organizations to Fortune 500 companies to government agencies. She is skilled in analyzing user needs and in interviewing subject matter experts. She also has articles published in books, magazines and journals and has conducted workshops for several conferences and seminars.
Richard (Rick) Gylling, M.B.A.
Senior Consultant
Rick brings more than 30 years of business experience, where he created innovative and effective systems in sales operations programs and policy development. He is widely recognized within the consumer packaged goods industry as a leader in creating, developing and implementing mutually beneficial and profitable customer sales, pricing and supply chain programs. These skills include developing effective training and control systems for employees to ensure their compliance with legal requirements and corporate rules, while developing accountability and performance measures to improve business results. During his career at Kraft Foods, he served as Vice President of Sales Operations, where he was responsible for developing and managing all sales policies, pricing policies and trade deal programs, and as Vice President of Customer Service and Logistics, with responsibility for customer service, distribution, transportation and product supply.
Philip Bertram,
Senior Consultant
During his 30+ year career, Phil served as a Vice President, Internal Audit and ERM Champion at SPSS, Inc. (now part of IBM) and a Director, Internal Audit for two major organizations: Komatsu America Corp. and NFC International Holdings, Inc. He also served Komatsu as its Compliance Officer. Prior to that, he held positions of increasing responsibility at American Brands, Inc., AAR Corp., FMC Corporation and Deloitte, Haskins & Sells. Phil has been responsible for overseeing the compliance audit systems as part of his role as a compliance monitor.
Christian Liipfert, J.D.
Senior Consultant
Christian has spent much of the past 30 years practicing law in the energy sector, having worked in Washington, DC, Atlanta, Paris, Chicago, Hong Kong, and Houston. Most recently, he was the Programme Director, Global Information & Records, and the Information Policy Director for BP, an international energy company with operations in more than 100 countries.
While in-house, Christian has conducted investigations into major industrial accidents, responded to allegations of criminal violations of environmental laws, negotiated major transactions in Asia, and managed the arbitration of large corporate contractual disputes. For the past several years, he has concentrated on code of conduct compliance and information governance on a global scale, including e-discovery and knowledge management, bridging the gaps between Legal, IT, Compliance, Records Management, Operations, Audit, and the users. He developed training for lawyers in how to respond to crises and emergencies, and compliance materials on antitrust and competition law, export control, and environmental, health & safety topics.
Christian has spoken and written extensively on information governance, e-discovery, knowledge management, antitrust and competition law, crisis management and emergency response, and the use of technology for compliance training and monitoring. He was a pioneer in the creation of e-learning modules for client education on legal topics ranging from environmental compliance, attorney client privilege and fatality investigations to international antitrust and competition law.
Christian was awarded his law degree, summa cum laude, from the Washington College of Law at American University in Washington, DC.
Les Mittman, M.S., M.A.
Senior Consultant
As a Senior Business/Application Consultant and Project Manager, Les has led over 80 successful Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software implementations in a wide range of industries including food, pharmaceutical, and discrete manufacturing companies. His clients have included both small to medium size manufacturing companies as well as large, multi-site companies such as Bristol-Myers Squibb and ConAgra Foods. Skilled at quickly understanding key business issues, analyzing requirements, and developing comprehensive solutions, Les possesses a comprehensive business background in the disciplines of Supply Chain Management, Manufacturing Operations, Inventory Management, Production Scheduling, Material Requirements Planning, Standard Costing, and Financial Applications.
As an effective communicator, motivator, project manager, and change management agent, Les has guided many companies through business process improvement, reengineering and optimization initiatives in order to achieve meaningful improvements in business results. His broad range of cross-industry, cross-functional experience brings insights and practical solutions to addressing complex business and operational challenges in today’s competitive environment.
Les holds a M.S. in Mathematics from University of Illinois, Chicago-Circle, and a M.A in Education with a specialization in Administration from Spertus College, Chicago, IL.
Frederick Z. Banks
Senior Consultant
Frederick Z. Banks is a specialist in automation tools for compliance, including e-learning. He has taught at the University of Missouri on advanced Computer Based Training (CBT) design and is sought at many conferences as a speaker on proposed interoperability standards. He chairs the subcommittee on Sharing Training Information for the Learning Education Systems Interoperability (LETSI), is a member of the Aviation Computer-Based Training Committee (AICC) and of the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Sharable Object Reference Model (SCORM) working group and represented Boeing for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). During his career at the Boeing Company, he designed their Intelligent Tutoring System and Courseware Conversion Tool. He also performed specialized military audits and consulted with most of the weapon platforms that involved Boeing and its partners. He is a graduate of the University of Illinois and Lindenwood University.