Adfero had historically provided nonpartisan public relations and marketing services to corporate clients and trade associations including PhRMA and the National Retail Federation. "Judicial ethics experts said Mascott’s operation of the firm falls in a gray area, given its nature as a family business," Politico reported. Charles Geyh, a law professor at Indiana University's Maurer School of Law specializing in judicial ethics, raised that very issue. "She came in and was running the organization while being a federal judge, and it got very weird," the client said. "All of a sudden, staff started leaving, and we saw that as an inflection point that it was time to move on."