Michael Roster was Managing Partner of Morrison & Foerster’s Los Angeles office as well as co-chair of the firm’s Financial Services Practice Group worldwide, resident in both Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. He subsequently served as General Counsel of Stanford University and Stanford Medical Center and then of Golden West Financial Corporation.
Mike has been a director and chair of the Association of Corporate Counsel, an outside director and vice chair of Silicon Valley Bank, chair of the Stanford Alumni Association, and chair of two start-up companies: Insert Therapeutics and Encirq. He also is a former director of the California Bankers Association and the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco.

Mike is currently the steering committee co-chair of the Association of Corporate Counsel’s Value Challenge, a project that is promoting fundamental reforms in how law firms and in-house counsel serve clients. He also is a director of MDRC, a nonprofit corporation based in New York that that evaluates the effectiveness of government and other programs affecting lower income families and individuals, and he chaired several years ago a project funded by two foundations that developed a private sector approach to eliminate abuses in consumer credit cards in the U.S.

The past five years, Mike also has been teaching an upper division contracts course at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law where the goal is for students to be at a second-year attorney level or higher in contracts by the end of the course. He also served on two faculty task forces looking at reforms in the law school’s curriculum.