Lizbeth Hasse, Esq.
General Counsel
1989–present

“I went with the very first team on the medical mission in 1990 to help raise Soviet media and other public interest in the program because of my experience and contacts in the Soviet media at the time. I couldn’t resist the project and began doing legal work and advising for it. I was invited to join the board during its first year, and I have been Heart to Heart’s general counsel for over twenty-five years now. I am very pleased with the maturity, inclusiveness, and remarkable sustainability of Heart to Heart’s medical programs.”

Lizbeth Hasse is a founding partner of Creative Industry Law, LLP in San Francisco. She practices in the fields of business law, intellectual property law (copyright, trademark, licensing and trade secret), media, entertainment and commercial law, and negotiations on an international basis. Much of her legal work is for media and technology clients in the software, motion picture, publishing, ecommerce, digital media, and telecommunications industries. Liz serves as a neutral mediator in her areas of expertise and has recently mediated cases involving Adelphia, Enron, race discrimination issues in Los Angeles area schools, Intel, and human rights cases involving major corporations.

Liz has served as chief legal counsel for international joint venture projects based in Russia, Ukraine and Senegal, as well as the U.S. She served as election monitor and mediator in the Fergana Valley region of Kyrgyzstan during 2001 elections. She also consulted in the mediation of disputes over the distribution of the first private broadcasting licenses in Moldova and assisted in setting up the criteria for resolution of similar broadcast licensing disputes for the initial distributions of independent broadcast licensing in the former USSR.

While Director of the Communications Law Project in the 1990s, she helped draft copyright, trademark and communications legislation in several Eastern European, African and Asian countries. Her advisory work has been supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Soros Foundation, Rockefeller Fund, and Washington Research Institute. Liz also consults as a Rule of Law and Democratic Governance Specialist and in 2001-2002 surveyed countries in Central Asia and the Caucasus to provide an assessment for the U.S. government of Rule of Law Programs in those regions. She was active in the early 1990s on Piracy Commissions set up by the Ministries of Culture and Communications for USSR/Russia.

She also currently serves on the Boards of Directors of TRACK II Center for Citizen Diplomacy and the Presidio World College. She previously served on the Board of The Russian-American Center (formerly The Soviet-American Center) for seven years. Liz speaks fluent French, comfortable German, and describes both her Russian and Spanish proficiency as “functional.”