 Executive Director
Program on the Legal Profession
Harvard Law School
23 Everett Street #G-24
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel: + 1 (617) 496-6151
Fax: + 1 (617) 496-8489
E-mail: eramanathan@law.harvard.edu
Erik Ramanathan is Executive Director of the Harvard Law School Program on the Legal Profession and its Center on Lawyers and the Professional Services Industry. His research interests include the role, structure and dynamics of in-house legal departments; the relationship between in-house attorneys and law firm counsel; the role and development of specialized legal professionals such as corporate secretaries and compliance officers; globalization of private and public sector law practice; developing market incentives for increasing attorney diversity; the evolution and future of private sector pro bono commitments; and issues of diversity, career progression and professional development among legally trained professionals across and between disparate practice sectors. Erik is particularly focused on involving current and future legal practitioners in proactively shaping and reinventing their profession.
Prior to joining HLS, Erik was Senior Vice President, General Counsel, Secretary & Chief Compliance Officer of ImClone Systems, a large-cap public biotechnology firm researching and commercializing novel targeted oncology therapeutics. Tapped as General Counsel of this $6 billion enterprise with eight in-house lawyers and a $20 million legal budget as an openly gay 33-year old, Erik’s six years at ImClone were an immersive crash course in the professional challenges of both enormous success and daunting and well-publicized legal, regulatory and governance crises. Negotiating and implementing the then-largest commercial biotechnology deal of all time and helping launch one of the world’s most successful oncology drug franchises while managing and cleaning up after insider trading scandals, shareholder and federal lawsuits, regulatory distrust, pharmaceutical partner disputes, Congressional and SEC inquiries, tax troubles, stock exchange delisting, three CEO transitions, a proxy battle with Carl Icahn, and a public M&A auction process for sale of the company have given Erik unique insight into the challenges of modern legal practice and a keen appetite for finding new ways of addressing and adapting to them.
Prior to his time at ImClone, Erik was an attorney at Proskauer Rose LLP in New York, where he provided transactional, regulatory and outside general counsel to academic medical centers and other health and human services industry clients as a member of the firm’s regionally preeminent health care practice. His strong substantive interest in health care and public health policy sprang in part from time spent on the Six Nations Iroquois reserve and from HIV/AIDS epidemic-related activism and advocacy beginning in the late 1980s.
In addition to his private sector experience, Erik chairs and has spent nearly a decade in various leadership roles on the board of Immigration Equality, the only national education, advocacy and legal services nonprofit dedicated to serving and achieving equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered and HIV-affected immigrants and asylum seekers. Working collaboratively with two dozen major law firms providing pro bono services, the organization handles thousands of client intakes and more than a hundred asylum and detention cases each year while making substantial progress on gay-inclusive comprehensive immigration reform and final repeal of the U.S.’ discriminatory HIV travel and immigration ban.
In addition to his work on the legal profession, Erik consults for both for-profit and not-for-profit enterprises on law department management and legal crisis control. He also writes and speaks on matters of public health and civil rights.
JD, Harvard Law School, 1996
BA in Natural Sciences – Behavioral Biology, The Johns Hopkins University, 1991
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