Matthew Hersh earned a B.A. in Political Science from Columbia University in 1990 and graduated cum laude from Georgetown University Law Center in 1999. He also holds a master’s degree in international relations from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service.
After law school, Mr. Hersh went to work for the Washington DC office of Jenner & Block LLP, one of the nation’s leading law firms for commercial and appellate litigation. While at Jenner, he was a member of the briefing team for several landmark Supreme Court cases, including MGM v. Grokster (2005), which established the liability of peer-to-peer file-sharing companies for infringing content, and Rumsfeld v. Padilla (2004), one of the first legal challenges to military detention policies to reach the Court in the post-9/11 era. As part of Jenner’s copyright litigation practice, Mr. Hersh helped to formulate the music industry’s initial strategy for combatting music piracy online and eventually oversaw the implementation of a groundbreaking settlement with an overseas website operator that resulted in the first-ever copyright “filter” in a commercial peer-to-peer music network. Mr. Hersh has also maintained an extensive public interest and pro bono practice throughout his legal career, including the successful reversal, in a habeas corpus action, of the wrongful murder conviction of an indigent woman in South Carolina woman based on the ineffective assistance of her prior counsel.
After leaving Jenner and Block in 2010, Mr. Hersh took up a career as a product development manager within the legal services industry. From 2013 to 2017, Mr. Hersh managed a 50-person multinational team of lawyers at a Washington DC-based law firm, developing legal databases for top legal providers and U.S. law firms. During this time, Mr. Hersh was responsible for the launch of three new legal databases tracking thousands of data points within publicly filed M&A and commercial financing agreements.
Since joining the Baer Reed team in 2017, Mr. Hersh has managed the company’s major product development activities and has been responsible for legal training. Mr. Hersh oversaw the creation of the company’s NDA Review service, training a team of attorneys to review and re-negotiate NDA agreements under the standards required by U.S. law and major corporate legal departments. Mr. Hersh has also overseen major legal research contracts with Fortune 100 clients, managing workflow and ensuring that legal research is performed to the rigorous standards required by U.S. law.
Mr. Hersh joined Baer Reed in 2017 and is currently the Vice President, Product Development & Training.