Food & Beverage MVP: Covington's Jessica O'Connell

Law360 selected Jessica O’Connell as a 2016 Food & Beverage MVP and profiled her involvement in FDA’s decision to review its “healthy” labeling regulations after convincing the agency to refrain from taking legal action against Kind LLC over allegedly misleading labeling of snack bars. According to O’Connell, her intimate understanding of the FDA was helpful as she attempted to collaborate with the agency rather than engage in an adversarial process. “What we identified very early on was that the biggest issue here is there were regulations that were really outdated,” she says.