Professor Podesta is the former Chief of Staff to the President. He served in the first Clinton administration as an assistant to the President and staff secretary at the White House, where he managed the paper flow to and from the President, including coordination of White House Senior Staff advice on Presidential decision memoranda and approval on all Presidential documents. He also served as the principal White House spokesperson on the Whitewater investigation and as the senior policy advisor to the President on government information, privacy, telecommunications, and regulatory policy. Before joining the Clinton administration, Professor Podesta was president and general counsel of Podesta Associates, Inc., a Washington, D.C., government relations and public affairs firm. He has had extensive Capitol Hill experience, serving as chief counsel for the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry and as chief minority counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee Subcommittees on Patents, Copyrights, and Trademarks; Security and Terrorism; and Regulatory Reform. He was special assistant to the director of Action, a federal volunteer agency and served as trial attorney in the Department of Justice, Land and Natural Resources Division. Professor Podesta has taught as an adjunct at the Law Center and has been a guest lecturer at American University Washington College of Law and at Harvard Law School. He was a visiting professor at the Law Center in the 1995-1996 and 1996-1997 academic years, and has been a summer faculty since 1997.