Roger Pollak is a member of the Bredhoff ^ Kaiser, PLLC firm. His practice focuses on assisting non-profit organizations, including unions, in managing a wide variety of organizational matters.
He is outside general counsel of Union Privilege, a non-profit organization that develops and promotes member benefits for unions affiliated with the AFL-CIO. In this capacity, he handles all of Union Privilege’s legal matters, including its business, tax, HR, privacy and information security, and governance issues.
For Union Privilege, Roger negotiates arrangements with banks, insurance companies, telecommunications companies, and numerous other product and service providers pursuant to which the services of these businesses are made available by Union Privilege to more than ten million union members. Most notably, Roger is responsible for managing both legal and business aspects of Union Privilege’s affinity credit card program, which – with more than one million cardholders – stands as one of the largest such programs in the world.
Roger also has responsibility for significant business-to-business contracting undertaken by the AFL-CIO itself – a $100 million year organization – including Internet, software, telecommunications, data management, and other business relationships. Roger handles similar responsibilities for numerous other firm clients.
Roger helped establish and is outside general counsel for Vital HealthCare Capital, a national charitable loan fund that provides financing and development services to support quality healthcare and good healthcare jobs in low-income communities, and the BlueGreen Alliance, a partnership of unions and environmental organizations that focuses on developing commonsense solutions to environmental challenges in a way that creates and maintains quality jobs.
Roger has assisted with the creation of many other non-profits, some that have involved the creation of sister 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) arrangements or for-profit subsidiaries. And Roger provides ongoing legal support for board and committee functions and other governance activities for many of these organizations.
Roger assists clients with trademark and copyright issues. He has negotiated numerous trademark licensing agreements, helping clients obtain fair royalties, comply with IRS requirements for ensuring the tax exempt treatment of such royalties, and protect the ownership of their marks. He also assists non-profits more generally in protecting intellectual property assets and dealing with trademark and copyright issues.
Roger addresses novel legal and managerial issues related to efforts of clients to make effective use of the Internet. He helps clients negotiate contracts for website development, hosting and other web-related services. He assists clients in crafting appropriate privacy policies, user agreements, and community guidelines for their websites and acceptable policies for use of email and the Internet by their employees. He also counsels clients on information security issues.
In addition to his work with non-profits, Roger has also represented clients in complex arbitrations, including interest arbitrations in the steel, postal, and airline sectors and airline pilot seniority list integrations. He has also assisted in major renegotiations of pilot and flight attendant collective bargaining agreements.
In approaching commercial contracting situations, Roger draws on his legal and business experience and skills to assist his clients with conceptualizing how best to structure a business relationship, how to reduce oral agreements to effective contract language, and, frequently, how to manage such relationships on a continuing basis.
Roger obtained his J.D. at Yale University, where he also received an M.B.A. from the Yale School of Management. Roger received his B.S. from the University of California at Berkeley, College of Natural Resources and was Valedictorian of his class. Prior to graduate school, Roger was executive director of a non-profit environmental group in Connecticut. During graduate school, he worked as a consultant for the firm of Brody & Weiser, providing financial and organizational consulting services to non-profits.
Roger helped found and is President Emeritus of The Rosedale Conservancy, a Washington, D.C. land trust that owns and manages a small urban historic landscape and park.
