Arash Heidarian and Phil Carter respectively serve as Legal Director and Product Counsel of Google’s Public Sector. We spoke with Professors Heidarian and Carter about their new class at GW Law, Government Procurement of Technology. They provided insight on their vision for the class, their reasons for creating it, and what they hope GW Law students will take away from their experience in the class. Professors Heidarian and Carter also offered advice to students hoping to break into the field.
Please introduce yourselves to the GW Law Government Procurement community. Could you tell us about your current roles at Google?
AH: I lead the Google public sector legal teams covering Cloud sales to government customers, where we engage in transactional, technical/product, and compliance matters. We support global cloud sales to national/federal, state/local/provincial, and education customers through direct and indirect (e.g., resellers) channels. Our legal team is made up of lawyers supporting deals, compliance, technical issues, business counseling, and public policy.
PC: I’ve been at Google about a year, and serve as product counsel for our public sector business. In practice, that means helping compliance, engineering, security, and other teams work through issues that come up with our accreditations like FedRAMP, or under contracts with customers. I also counsel our national security business, and help with deals where there are product terms to negotiate or clarify, such as how Google manages data or responds to incidents.
Please describe your career paths that led you to where you are now. How did each of you become interested in the government contracts field?
AH: I had an awesome opportunity to get my feet wet in government contracts as an intern at USAID’s Office of General Counsel, where I got my first experience dealing with the puzzle that we refer to as the FAR. I loved that government contracts professionals engage in such a variety of work from transactions, compliance, litigation, counseling, contract management, business counseling, and so much more. I loved that government contacts issues included a wide array of things from bid protests, contract performance, pre/post strategy, systems building, claims and disputes, compliance management, cost accounting, policy influencing—and in a myriad of fields from construction, aerospace, defense, technology, and commodity producers. I found that after law school, the GW Law Government Procurement Law LLM program was the perfect way to get deeper in the various government contracts fields. The program was critical in helping me break into the field. Following the skills picked up in the program, I had opportunities to work in small and large government contracts firms and in-house with small, medium, and large government contractors.
PC: I went to law school after four years in the Army, and wanted to remain connected to public service and the public sector. The government contracts practice at McKenna Long & Aldridge seemed like a great place to do that, so I joined McKenna in 2004, where my mentor was Thomas Abbott (GW Law, ‘84). I left McKenna a couple of times to serve in government, and eventually to manage a startup government contractor and do policy work. Several years ago, I started teaching a course at Georgetown on private sector national security law—a mix of government contracts, export controls, industrial security compliance, and other hot topics. I moved back to law practice a few years ago, joining Tableau as in-house counsel for public sector issues, and then moved to Salesforce as part of its acquisition of Tableau. Tech companies like these (and Google, where I’m at now), are a vibrant and innovative part of the government contracts community, and it’s a really exciting place to practice at the intersection of the public and private sectors.
Professor Heidarian, can you speak to how your experience in the GW Law Government Procurement Law LLM program influenced your career?
AH: I couldn’t be more grateful for the foundation that the Government Procurement Law program provided. There were some areas of the program that I swore I would never do in the real world – like work with the Cost Accounting Standards (CAS)—and to my delightful surprise I ended up working in a government contracts legal practice for seven years that focused on CAS counseling and litigation. Without the broad based foundation from the program on topics like bid protests, claims, international government contracting—and yes, even CAS—I would have faced a huge uphill challenge when transitioning into private practice where junior associates are expected to have some knowledge on the range of issues affecting government contractors.
We are excited to be offering your new course this semester – Government Procurement of Technology. Can you tell us about it?
AH: I’ve given a lot of thought to this course over the past 7-10 years. After helping launch the Amazon Web Services public sector business and legal team, it became evident that while there were a lot of smart and capable government contracts professionals with a ton of experience supporting different facets of contracting issues, there were not many focused on—or with substantive experience with—technology contractors. We’re seeing an unprecedented increase in the number of start-up, well-established, large, medium, and small technology firms trying to sell their commercial offerings to federal, state, and local government customers. The purpose of this course is to prepare the next generation of government contracts professionals to help support the rocketship growth from technology vendors supporting the public sector.
What motivated you to create the course? Are there any emerging issues or trends in this area that prospective students should be aware of?
PC: There was a tectonic shift in government contracting when we were starting our careers, from the procurement of goods to the procurement of services. Another tectonic shift is underway now, as the government seeks to leverage technology (and often commercial technology) to update, change, or in some cases replace, legacy goods and services programs that it procured for decades. Cloud computing is the best example of this, but AI services will likely be another that we will watch over the next few years. We created this course to explore the unique issues affecting how government agencies buy technology, which in some cases are derived from legacy contracting rules, but in many cases have to be developed anew, based on evolving commercial practices to sell products that simply didn’t exist a decade ago.
Why is government procurement of technology an important component of our students’ educational experience at GW Law?
PC: Technology creates opportunities for government agencies to better serve their stakeholders and achieve outcomes. Cloud-based customer relationship management tools are a great example; they knit governments at all levels more closely together with their constituents, and enable a previously-impossible level of customer service, transparency, auditability, and efficacy. However, technology can also have risk; that risk can be highly scalable for both agencies and their contractors. A data breach can affect millions (or even billions) of stakeholders almost immediately. GW Law students should understand these issues, because their careers will increasingly be shaped (or defined) by technology in the decades to come.
What advice would you give a student considering a career path that involves going in-house and helping companies sell their technology to the government? How can a student or a recent graduate break into this field
PC: Immerse yourself in the technology and get to know how it works. You don’t need to be a coder or engineer (although those backgrounds are helpful), but a basic grasp of things like cloud architecture is essential to framing and understanding legal issues in this space. At the very least, you should be conversant in how technology is used by your clients (regardless of industry), as well as how risks differ across platforms (i.e. the difference between risk profiles for on-premises software vs. cloud-based software-as-a-service). In the years to come, lawyers will need to know the fundamentals about software, cloud services, data centers, infrastructure-as-a-service, AI, and more.