Category: Interviews

I have spent my entire career here at Ford, and it’s a special story that I’m really proud of.

I grew up in Syracuse, New York, and I went to undergraduate law school in Buffalo. My wife was a year behind me in law school. We looked at law firms in Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse – it’s a beautiful part of the country and we really had a desire to stay there. But as you scanned the major law firms at the time, I don’t believe there were any black partners, there were very few women, and I couldn’t identify any gay or lesbian partners. We therefore concluded it was not likely that I would be successful in any of these firms if others that looked like me had failed to achieve success. So I didn’t even look for a job in the area where I grew up and wanted to live. But we did see a diversity of lawyers achieving success in places like New York, Philadelphia and Washington DC. And so that’s where we decided that I would look for a job.

It only happened to be that Ford was at a Black Law Students Association job fair, and I was intrigued by the company and in-house practice. Up until that point I had really only thought about going to a law firm.

After my second year at law school, I clerked at Ford for the summer, and when I went back to law school in my third year, I was given an offer of full-time employment, contingent on finishing law school and passing the bar. I vividly remember taking the bar exam on the Wednesday and Thursday, taking the weekend off and starting work the following Monday.

The thing that attracted me to the idea of being in-house at Ford was that it was the size of a good law firm. Today, globally, there are 620 in the legal office, but at that time it was significantly larger. Ford’s legal department handled its work predominantly in-house, and the idea of being able to see the issues from inception to conclusion and then living with the business consequences is what intrigued me, as opposed to working on discrete issues – where you may not understand the business imperative.

The way I’d describe the company and the way the legal office is run, is that it’s as close as I’m ever going to get to an entrepreneurial experience inside a company. The company has always been very innovative and very open to new ideas and new thoughts, and there has always been a keen focus on talent development. The intellectual challenges here are just so rich, I also had the opportunity to take on new assignments every three or four years within the legal office, and I have continued learning and growing – so I’ve stayed.

Being the assistant general counsel was helpful in taking on the general counsel role, in part because I was also the corporate secretary. So I wasn’t getting to know the board for the first time when I became general counsel – I understood the governance requirements and the CEO and board responsibilities at that level, so that bit of the transition was quite natural.

Having grown up here, the existing relationships that I had changed when I became general counsel. I sat on the operating committee of the office of the general counsel with my peers, all of whom were very talented and any one of them could reasonably have expected that they would be GC. So part of this job on day one was re-recruiting my peers, and acknowledging just what incredible lawyers and leaders they are, and reaffirming that all the fantastic work we had done as a leadership team was going to continue.

And then relationships with the rest of the c-suite were a little different. As corporate secretary, you’re helping to facilitate the needs of the c-suite, and so moving to become their peer was a great opportunity to interview them about their perceptions of the office. I tried to take on what I perceived to be misperceptions about the risk appetite of the office, and asked the question, ‘How have your business imperatives been constrained by the legal advice you have received?’ My objective was to understand the real barriers they’re dealing with as they’re trying to advance their business objectives, and what are the barriers that are perceived which we could eliminate.

When I found out about getting the GC job, there were three things I did: I told my wife over lunch that day, I started re-recruiting my peers, and then I took time to sit down and come up with a transition plan. I had the privilege of having two and a half months where I had overlap with David Leitch, our former general counsel, and in that period of time I focused on developing external relationships. I’d done a fairly good job of establishing networks as I moved up, but that peer group isn’t all moving up to general counsel at the same time. The general counsel role is so unique that it is just so helpful to have other GCs to call on, because there isn’t anybody on your team who’s experiencing the same thing that you’re experiencing. That network of GCs is just so important to be able to tap into to bounce ideas around some of the challenges you are facing.

I also spent time getting ‘boot camps’ by going to different law firms, based on their expertise, to go deep in areas of the law where I hadn’t practiced before. I also started to spend time with senior folks at law firms so that I could develop a crisis management plan. My instinct was that I needed to find a good set of lawyers that could really help me if I had a crisis – lawyers that are battle-tested and have been through crisis before, so that a team would be already in place should the need arise.

I rise at 4:30am every day thinking, ‘How am I going to beat my competition?’ I’m fiercely competitive and so are our lawyers, and innovation is a big part of that. I think of it in three phases – now, near and far. I draw a circle for ‘now’, I draw a bigger circle around it and I call that ‘near’, and I draw an even bigger circle around ‘near’ and I call it ‘far’. I obviously have to spend time in all three areas, but where my most significant value can come from is thinking about the ‘far’, because if we can anticipate both where the law is going and where the business is going, we can identify solutions that are out in the far and then try to bend them back to today. If I can reach out toward the future in how I’m thinking and bring those solutions back to today, the curve that comes back is my competitive advantage – that’s how we can contribute to beating the competition.

What that practically means is that in the now, I am using firms that are using AI for e-discovery. But as I think about the far, we also have a team of people thinking about how artificial intelligence can actually be used to write patent applications. We’re in the process of exploration about what that could look like, and there’s a number of tech firms who are experimenting in this space, so we spend time with them, considering issues like, do we do we enter into things like a joint development or joint venture agreement with them to more fully explore it together?

We are also considering artificial intelligence solutions in the contracts space – not just in terms of writing basic agreements, but is there a way to use AI to really help evaluate the aggregate risk that we have in our contracts portfolio, and is there a way to help people make good choices about the trade offs they’re making when they’re negotiating contacts? Which vendor to go with, what jurisdiction is going to govern, indemnity provisions – there’s all kind of trade offs people make when they’re negotiating contracts, but can AI help optimize results for us relative to our total portfolio of contracts?

In the future, I do think that the way we work will be very different. Just imagine a technology-enabled practice that has more virtual reality to it. It’s not that we’ll be interacting with holograms necessarily, but it could be that we shorten the distances between each other globally. Why isn’t there the technology to support better video interface so that it feels as if people are appearing in the chair across from me so that we can have a much more human interaction than say, the telephone or low-definition video? I think that will help in relationships with law firms, but I also see it being really beneficial in courtrooms as well – in interactions with witnesses and judges. I see ultimately advances there where the level of pro bono work we’re all doing to provide people with access to justice will be technology-enabled, and will be able to help more people to get access to justice.

When I was in private practice, I represented McKesson in a number of significant litigation matters. About 2010, the general counsel approached me and asked me if I would ever consider going in-house, because the head of the litigation group was planning to retire. I hadn’t been thinking about going in-house, so the question came to me out of the blue. I was very flattered to be asked, but I didn’t think that was the right move for me at that point. But he kept talking to me over the course of the next year, trying to intrigue me on the notion and finally, in 2012, I came on board as head of the litigation team and associate general counsel.

I had to really get a deep understanding of McKesson, because even though I’d represented the company in multiple cases beforehand, I really could not have imagined the rest of the issues and products and services the company was involved in until after I came on board. It was certainly a learning curve to understand all the different ways that McKesson was adding value to the healthcare system.

For me, that was a great opportunity to feel like I could be a student again in a way I had not been for so many years, because I had become so familiar with so much of the work I was doing, it became second nature. Now I was in a great position where I could learn and develop new knowledge and new skills.

In June 2014, I became general counsel a little bit unexpectedly. I learned in the middle of June that the GC was leaving the company and that I, along with two of my colleagues, would be interviewed as the potential replacement. Two weeks later, I became GC and she was gone. It was a fast transition, but a wonderful opportunity for me to add value at a level that I had not known beforehand. As daunting as my two weeks’ notice was, I could really dive in and help the decision-making for a much broader audience than I had been facing before.

One of the first things I had to do was meet with a variety of people to make sure I had the full breadth and understanding of what my role would entail. The general counsel organization that I head up is not just a legal department, it’s also the compliance department, the public affairs group, the corporate secretary function, and I had soon also formed a legal operations function. So initially it was a deep dive into making sure I understood the roles, responsibilities, goals and priorities, and really got to know the people who would be on my leadership team even better and understand what their teams were working on.

But then obviously I was now also a member of the executive committee of the company, and I had responsibilities towards our board of directors. On a daily basis, I was managing a variety of legal and business issues, working with the business leaders from across the company, working with the HR team and the leadership team to help drive employee engagement and career development, dealing with outside counsel and the like. My world had expanded dramatically.

All of this was happening at a time of great transition for the company itself, which was about to go global. We had just acquired Celesio, a public company with employees and operations in multiple countries across Europe – countries that McKesson had not ventured into before. So at the same time as I was digesting the organization that I was going to run, I was helping the company digest what it would mean to be much more of a global enterprise with distinct regulatory landscapes in Europe and all of the new issues that we would be facing. On top of all that, over the previous three years there had been significant changes in the healthcare world globally – our customers and suppliers in our traditional markets were undergoing massive consolidation and disruption, and government oversight was increasing everywhere. So my transition to becoming general counsel was really at a transition point for the whole healthcare environment as well.

If I were to advise anybody else who was about to make a transition similar to mine, the two things that come to mind are agility and prioritisation. When I started, the issues were constantly changing and the challenges we were facing and decisions we had to make were accelerating at a pace that I don’t think we had seen in the three years before I became general counsel. In light of that, I really do think it requires nimbleness and an ability to move from one issue to another with a keen sense of how one has to prioritize.

When I came to the company, I had always understood that the mission of the general counsel organization was to be trusted advisers that the company would turn to for help in mitigating and managing legal, reputational and competitive risk arising from existing laws or laws we were seeking to advance or change in some way. But as we began to see the landscape changing, I was very much inspired to start thinking about forward-looking values that my organization could contribute. I changed the mission statement to be a vision statement, and in addition to the important role of mitigating risk, I really started thinking about whether there were more active and strategic ways that we could help the company. We thought about ourselves not just as the team that got called when the company wanted to tackle a difficult issue, but we wanted to be the team they called when they wanted to innovate in what they were doing or think about new ways that they could add value to the healthcare system.

In the course of that, over the last three years we’ve done a number of things to demonstrate to the company that when we have a seat at the table, we can help them think about new ways to deliver value to our customers and our shareholders. We’ve been brainstorming about innovative processes and technologies, like having a standardized process for how the businesses will enter into contracts – a contract library that will reduce contract review time and improve how quickly our businesses can enter into contracts with their customers and their suppliers.

Another example is when, over a year ago, some folks on my team thought it would be a great idea to form a task force across the company to bring together subject matter experts from a variety of different areas to help brainstorm possible solutions to the opioid crisis that the US is facing. People from the law department, the public affairs department and the compliance departments started working with some of our business leaders, including some that are doctors and pharmacists with a deep knowledge of the different points that a patient navigates when seeing a doctor, dealing with insurance companies, dealing with pharmacists and so forth.

Over the course of many months, they published a white paper, which they’ve now shared with legislators. It contains ideas for ways we could change laws, or get better training or tools to help pharmacists or doctors manage some of the tough issues that the opioid epidemic has created. The company has made a number of recommendations, some of which have been adopted or touted as good ideas by state and federal legislative policy makers. Most recently, we helped the company form a foundation dedicated solely to addressing issues surrounding the opioid epidemic. Having a legal team that understands what it takes to put a foundation together and the expertise across the team is another way of transforming what the general counsel organization can do going forward.

Being a part of advancing ideas like these has been an incredibly rewarding part of what my team has been able to participate in, and I do think it stems from the fact that we all got together and embraced changing the role of our organization from just risk mitigating to being risk mitigating plus value adding.

I spent the first 10-12 years of my career working as a labor and employment specialist. Then, I spent about five years in private practice, before I finally moved in-house. I had found out pretty early on that I valued the long-term relationships and the business engagement that comes from working inside a company, so when the opportunity came up to work in-house at 3M Company, I took it. At 3M, I spent a number of years as a labor and employment lawyer, but then was asked in 2008 to take a general counsel role for the company’s consumer segment. After that, I spent seven years working in business roles and had terrific opportunities to move into international legal leadership roles as well as become the company’s chief compliance officer.

On assuming the general counsel role at CHS in 2015, the biggest learning curve was the responsibilities relating to governance and the board of directors. I had board committee assignments in prior roles, but being the board’s lawyer where you have to advise on their responsibilities and fiduciary duties to the company, represents a very different challenge. I had to learn how to walk the line of: yes, I’m part of the management team, but I also have very clear and important responsibilities as the counsel for the company. How to navigate those dual roles was a big part of that overall governance-related learning curve.

Our board is comprised of 17 people. You’re building relationships that are not just task-based, only requiring attention as and when an issue comes along; you’re there all the time. I’m responsible for educating and counseling them, and I’m aware that board members must learn quickly – it’s not like there’s an orientation period in which one can get up to speed. This in itself is a big challenge.

One time stands out as being particularly challenging for me in this role. CHS is a cooperative, governed and owned by more than 600,000 farmers and ranchers across the US. We were going through a process to amend the membership provisions of our cooperative, and I was on the front line of the communication strategies relating to the change because they were governance-related changes. I was actually communicating with the members, and a lot of them were quite vocal in their views about how things should be. Our owner members are passionate about CHS and they are willing to share their views, which is terrific. At the same time, figuring out how to be an effective communicator with an audience of owners was very different to my prior experience and, frankly, I learned and got better over time by having communications that didn’t go so well.

I also lead on compliance and government affairs. In that latter space, the big challenge is that government affairs and lobbying activities are a very different sort of world than most corporate lawyers are dealing with. There’s a system of how things work and the rules that operate in that system are all very different than the rules of the courts, where lawyers are traditionally trained, or rules of transactions, where lawyers spend a lot of their time. I’ve had to spend time as a student of my government affairs team, having them explain to me why their strategy on a given issue is the way that it is, how things work and how the role is done in a way that drives the company’s reputation forward.

The compliance area is much more comfortable for me, because I was the chief compliance officer in a prior role. I believe it’s a wonderful training ground for general counsel, because compliance is very, very important, but also because it is based on process and systems. General counsel need to get more familiar with how processes are built and operated, and the role of systems in managing risk.

Project and process management is going to be more and more important for in-house counsel. I am asked on a regular basis to take responsibility for a project or for an initiative – and that’s not just negotiating a contract or a transaction. It involves a number of other skills around establishing how are we going to move from the objective to the goal, the steps of the process, what process tools should we be using, how do we want to communicate change management issues to people – and, again, that’s a skillset that needs to be built.

With hindsight, the advice I would give to myself is to be more proactive at building relationships with the level of leaders below my c-suite peers. I spent a tremendous amount of time with my direct colleagues and the board of directors, but I should have done more to get to know the business unit leaders. They are the people who are most important to the operating rhythm of the company and to our risk management practices. Most employees in the company will look to their business unit leaders for guidance relating to culture, appropriate behavior and day-to-day leadership, and had I accelerated my learning and meeting with those people, I think I would have known more about the company earlier.

As general counsel, we’re going to have to get even more involved in understanding the business – and not just where the business is, but the strategies of the business and where the business is going. We’re going to have to be more familiar with the markets, the customers, the competitors and the products of our company than we ever have been in order to be effective at being proactive in our advice, and to be strategic in the issues the company is facing.

You need to be very open to any opportunity that comes your way that doesn’t fit in the narrow model of business lawyer for a company or law firm lawyer. If there’s an opportunity to take on a project, or to be part of a project team that is completely unrelated to what you do day to day – my advice is to take that opportunity. If there’s an opportunity to go to a new area of law, even if it’s for a limited time, take it, because you’ll have to stretch your skillset and your way of thinking and you’ll have to learn new ways of working, not only with other people, but just working in new areas. I’ve never taken an assignment where at the end of it I said, ‘Boy, I wish I hadn’t done that.’ It’s always been, ‘I’m so thankful someone gave me the opportunity to do something different.’

Looking to the future, I think that globalization is going to have an impact on the role of the general counsel. We have not seen the final stages of globalization yet. Because of this, I think there is going to be an increase not only in the risk profile that companies take on, but in the complexity of managing risk within the business. That’s something that I think relates very directly to the general counsel’s role.

As well as that, I think that people who want to be general counsel need to get more global in their perspective. I don’t mean necessarily living outside your home country, but I think having that global perspective and being able to understand and value the differences in cultures, and being able to be inclusive in how you work with people, whether they are next to you or whether they’re 5,000 miles away – that’s a skillset; it’s not just your nature.

As the workforce keeps changing – its composition, generations, geographies, working in one building versus working remotely – we have to be better at building relationships. I don’t mean being good communicators, like being able to give a good speech or a good talk, I mean the fundamentals of building relationships with people who might be very different from me in age, or in how they approach their work. At the same time, these relationships are going to be harder to build, because it won’t just be someone next to me or down the hall anymore – they are going to be far away geographically and culturally.

When I started my career, I didn’t have any preconceptions of where things would lead. I clerked for a year then headed to the New Jersey attorney general’s office, where I cut my teeth on labor and employment cases, while spending a lot of time on my feet in court. I enjoyed the role – the cases were stimulating – it was a great place to learn, to make mistakes and to develop my style.

After leaving the government, I took the road less travelled and joined a large class action shop in New York City, focusing on plaintiff’s side work, where I helped litigate the ‘MTBE MDL’ environmental contamination cases. I represented a number of states and municipalities across the US in recovering groundwater clean-up costs from the refiners and additive manufacturers – and felt a little like Erin Brockovich. The experience was a turning point in my career, where I was forced to think strategically about large pieces of litigation from the opposite side. I can’t replace those three years on ‘the dark side’ with any other experience, and they continue to shape the way I view smart litigators and a good litigation strategy.

After leaving the firm, I joined Tyco International’s law department. Tyco had just hired a new general counsel, Judy Reinsdorf, and she was building out a new department. The company was still wrestling through the morass of litigation brought on by the missteps of its former CEO, Dennis Koslowski (imprisoned in 2005 for fraud). The company was in a dynamic time and undergoing significant change. I had outstanding mentors, both in the business and within the law department, and my time at Tyco fostered my interest in continuing my career in-house. It was an exciting time to be an in-house lawyer at Tyco, and it felt a little like Christmas every day as we worked through enormously complex issues with an exceedingly talented and dedicated team.

I left Tyco to lead the litigation department (and later the compliance function) for The ADT Corporation – a spinoff of Tyco – in 2012. At ADT, I worked hard to achieve cost reductions through in-sourcing and initiated a legal cost recovery program, yielding significant seven-figure checks to the company every year. I reported to the board’s audit committee in my role as chief compliance officer, and enjoyed the unique perspective of wearing both the litigation and compliance hats. The experience helped me think more tactically, and gave me a bird’s eye view of our enterprise. I enjoyed implementing risk mitigation measures to address operational gaps, and it was exciting to be part of the solution.

After ADT was sold to Apollo Global Management, I took a position with PSEG as its deputy general counsel, chief litigation counsel and assistant corporate secretary. Though my time there was brief, it helped prepare me for the general counsel’s office at Kelly Services.

I joined Kelly Services in the fall of 2017, and it has been exciting to join one of the most recognized and trusted brands in the workforce solutions space. Though Kelly has been in business for more than 70 years, it is constantly evolving: the past year alone has brought a new CEO, a focused go-forward strategy, and a more connected, energized culture.

My most significant challenge has been learning the industry and the workforce solutions space, and I have been spending the majority of my first six months listening, processing, learning, and understanding.

Kelly has a diverse full-time and part-time talent pool, and I strongly believe that an organization will not yield the best result or reach the best decision unless there’s engagement from differing backgrounds and perspectives. I just joined Kelly’s diversity and inclusion committee, and am excited about the company’s initiatives in this space. We impact the lives of those we’re able to touch, and our employees make up the fabric of our commitment to doing the right thing, always.

Kelly is also looking at the future of work. The company is evaluating technology as a tool to secure efficiencies in connecting people to work, and I am currently evaluating an electronic contract review platform that will increase service levels and support to my internal clients. Kelly is examining the benefits of utilizing artificial intelligence and machine learning, and implementing the use of bots, so we can serve our customers and talent more effectively in a highly competitive and evolving marketplace.

It’s important that the general counsel’s office evolves in lockstep with ongoing changes to technology. Technology introduces tremendous advantages that often carry inherent, but manageable risks. Our team is vigilant and disciplined in keeping abreast of developments, and educating our internal and external clients about the legal implications of tech in their business.

It’s important to closely partner with our business as opposed to acting as just a legal adviser, and in-house attorneys need to be business partners that are integrated into the decision-making process.

I believe that the most important quality for a general counsel is judgement. We’re in this office to make difficult decisions, and having a deep knowledge of the law and regulations isn’t enough anymore – it’s building influence and offering real commercial solutions. Lawyers are traditionally trained and valued for their technical expertise, but in-house attorneys and GCs really need to learn how they can best add value to the organization by understanding context.

Getting to the GC’s office may involve taking different roles along the way. Remaining in one functional area may not necessarily be the best route. If you have the ability, try different areas: jumping from litigation to compliance, to the corporate secretary’s office, taking on an expat assignment or even taking a business role – these are all experiences that help prepare you to become an effective general counsel.

Whatever role you’re in, don’t be afraid to ask questions. Joining a new company and a new industry has a lot of challenges. People at Kelly have been generous with their time, helping me to accelerate the inevitable learning curve that comes with joining a new company. But when you join a new organization, make sure that you’ll have access to the support and resources you’ll need to become effective. If you don’t have those tools or resources available, or you don’t feel secure in asking questions, failure is certain. And don’t be afraid to ask the simple questions. Oftentimes, including a fresh perspective causes people to rethink and re-evaluate things, which is never a bad thing.

Becoming general counsel was actually not anything I ever planned. What led me here was a series of jumping on opportunities and being willing to take a few risks along the way.

After law school, I clerked for a judge, then I was at a law firm for a couple of years, and then I went to the District Attorney’s office. I always wanted to be a trial lawyer, and I really loved the criminal side of law. I thought I would be a prosecutor for the rest of my career.

But then, in 2008, my husband founded a software startup, and the condition of the investment was to relocate to Silicon Valley from Atlanta. We had to move at 30 days’ notice, which meant I had no opportunity to even register to take the California bar, much less study and pass it!

So we moved, and I got a position at Gibson Dunn. They did not have a strong presence in white-collar criminal defence and internal investigations in the Bay Area, and so I was very focused on that as well as a number of general litigation matters. I ended up really loving that experience, especially what I was doing on the white-collar and the internal investigations side. Over time, about half my job became advising clients on the effectiveness of their compliance programs and even helping them establish compliance programs.

One day, I received a call from a recruiter asking if I’d be interested in creating the compliance department at this new solar energy startup that was backed by Elon Musk. I absolutely loved it. l was at Solar City for three or four years and then, when the acquisition by Tesla happened, I was asked to take over and lead and create a formal compliance department for Tesla.

In the spring of 2017, once again a recruiter contacted me, this time about compliance for Credit Karma. I wasn’t quite sure that I wanted to make a move from Tesla but then, out of the blue, Kenneth Lin, Credit Karma’s CEO, asked if I would be interested in making a move to become their chief legal officer. I decided to take yet another leap of faith and do something that I had not done before.

On one side, as anyone coming into a new role will say, there’s an intense learning curve in getting to know the company. How does it operate? What are the specific challenges they face? What are all those different ways people do things? How are things structured that might be different from what you’re used to? And on top of all that, because it was my first time coming in to lead an established legal and compliance team, I had to get to know the team and what people were focused on and how I could best help.

Those are all challenges in any in-house role, but fintech is a highly regulated space, and we are in a hypergrowth period at the company. I was very fortunate to have worked with two companies previously that were both extraordinarily innovative and doing something very disruptive, and which were also going through hypergrowth phases. That was actually fairly familiar and it’s something I find very exciting – I don’t think I would have made a move if there was not that level of innovation and excitement here. I encourage myself and my entire team really to embrace the change, embrace the idea that we’re doing things people have not done before, and recognize that this presents really interesting challenges and once-in-a lifetime opportunities for attorneys and compliance professionals who are figuring out how do we do these things in a legal and compliant way.

The first thing that I have focused on has been really ensuring that we all, as a team, have an innovative mindset. A lot of folks in legal and compliance departments get a bad name as the ‘department of no’, where you’re trying to stop things or shut things down. What I’ve been very much encouraging my team to do when someone comes to you very excited about an idea, instead of having a knee jerk reaction of: ‘Oh we need to put the brakes on’, is to think: ‘How can I be a really great partner? This is an interesting idea, let me look into it, how can we make this happen in a legal and compliant way? What can we do to embrace that change, to walk with our business partners and help manoeuvre around potential landmines or blocks, so that we’re really in it together?’ Rather than setting up an environment where business partners feel that they have to push against legal and compliance or try to avoid us because we’re going to get in the way.

I see a lot of my role as being one of educating, be it our members, our regulators, our external business partners and others, about what it is we’re doing. Most of the consumer protection regulations in existence line up very perfectly with what we’re trying to do, and so that makes it fairly easy from that standpoint – we are trying to help people make sense of something that has traditionally been really complicated and confusing, and give people transparency and clarity in making financial decisions.

As far as looking at the current regulatory regime, oftentimes many of these laws were put into existence decades ago, well before anyone even thought about fintech, and before any of these things were even possible. How do we make sure that we are abiding by the spirit of the law? There’s much that is in a gray area, and that is actually really fun and interesting to think about – how do we set things up to make sure that we’re doing the right thing now and in the future?

Companies need people who understand the business inside and out, and the industry. They need people who understand how many of these complicated regulatory regimes intersect, and who can help navigate where laws are under development, or where there’s not a lot of consistency and clarity. People who can sit back and take a holistic view and help guide their executives and board on the ethical way to go, the safe way to go, and also make sure that we’re providing plenty of opportunities for the company to innovate, be creative and try things that are new.

I would say the other side of it is seeing your entire legal and compliance department as a business unit in itself, and thinking about how you can make sure that you’re building the right team, that you have ways of evaluating what the team is doing and how much value you are providing to your business partners. How you function with legal operations is another big area, and having that business sense and applying it to the entire legal and compliance function is critically important.

I think if I could go back and tell myself anything as I took on this role, it would be to trust myself even more and realize that everyone, especially in the tech space, is learning a lot as they go. There’s not a hard and fast playbook, and there’s not going to be a lot of tried and true lessons that they can plug and play. It’s important to not be afraid to ask what may seem like stupid questions. Really get in and be willing to roll up your sleeves and – especially if you’re working in the tech space – dig in and understand the technology. Don’t assume that anyone has already looked into something and don’t necessarily take something at face value. There may be a way of doing something that people have not thought of yet, or a different approach in how you design your products that could completely get rid of any potential legal risk. Just really focus on that creativity. That would be my advice – just be comfortable with the fact that no one has one this before and so it’s fine if you don’t necessarily know all the answers off the bat.

My path here was intentional, although the irony is I really was not a huge sports fan growing up. I really fell in love with it in college, and pretty immediately started working in sport. In a lot of ways, I’ve grown up in the business, so part of what I fell in love with was the business of sport as well as the game of football. I worked in sports media and communications before going to law school, and I entered Stanford with the goal of returning to sports.

My 1L summer, I asked the Raiders, for whom I had been a PR intern in college, if I could come back as a law clerk, which they were very gracious in allowing me to do. I went to law firm Akin Gump for my second summer, because I knew that partner Dan Nash did a lot of work for the National Football League (NFL). I worked at Latham & Watkins after I graduated, and then at the NFL League office in New York. The 49ers’ EVP of football operations, Paraag Marathe, got to know me from my work at the League, and he asked me if I would interview for a position they had just created here – which was director of legal affairs. There were a lot of people, including my own family, who said: ‘Oh that’s so nice to hear you’re going to interview – you’re never going to get that job!’

The team’s executive vice president, Patty Inglis, had created the position with a plan in place to groom me to eventually become the general counsel. The role grew as I created our external affairs department. Shortly thereafter, we added a risk management department. Last year, we aligned a number of departments to create our community impact team, which is a conglomerate of the 49ers Foundation, community relations, 49ers Prep (which runs free youth football camps and flag football leagues), our STEAM education program (where we invite in 60,000 kids a year to get them excited about science, technology, engineering, arts and math through football), external affairs, fan engagement, and the 49ers Museum.

My role as general counsel felt like a natural evolution. It was really the beginning of my time at the 49ers where the learning curve was the sharpest. There was so much I was doing on the business side that was unfamiliar to me. My first few months, I didn’t know if I would make it every day. I was here 10 hours a day – but I was growing.

Inglis and I were building the infrastructure of the legal department with things like a contract management system, while working to get Levi’s® Stadium built – so that was a really intense couple of years.

I received a lot of very good advice along the way to becoming general counsel from Inglis and other general counsel, such as to learn the business underlying each contract and therefore draft or negotiate a better agreement, and how to hone those contract-drafting skills.

Like many GCs, the struggle is in trying to step back and think strategically for the future, while not completely suffocating in the fires you need to put out every day. A lot of it is risk management, especially now in the current business environment – looking at the risk profile of various business decisions and determining what’s best for the organization both from a brand and revenue standpoint. As general counsel, we have a particular lens for seeing potential downsides and evaluating their likelihood and severity.

As a general counsel, more of your role becomes about leading other people than about being a really expert attorney in a traditional, technical sense. It becomes more about soft skills and your ability to manage and lead attorneys and non-attorneys alike. My advice to people who want to become general counsel would be to develop the ability to teach and lead others, and to communicate with and influence peer departments in the business. We don’t do a good enough job in training lawyers in those skills.

My proudest moment was during a challenging and difficult time in the business, and somebody who was in a position of power asked me: ‘What would you do if you were me?’ I think that’s ultimately the goal – it’s our role as the counselor, the consigliere, to develop that trust.

Another proud moment would be the opening of the Levi’s® Stadium. We put so much blood, sweat and tears into that, and it was a group effort of literally thousands of people – from architects, to financiers, to construction workers, to lawyers, to salespeople. You have this incredible communal feeling of hard work that pays off in a physical thing that you can actually see.

The difficult moments, when there’s turnover or change, where human livelihoods and families are involved – those are the most challenging moments in football. It can also be tough when public perception does not match the reality inside an organization. Thankfully I enjoy what I do, so it doesn’t diminish my love of the game, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t hard days. When you’re having a tough season, it is hard on everyone, although obviously hardest on the players and coaches.

We do a lot of work at the intersection of football and science. One of the things that I didn’t foresee before I came to work here was how many software agreements we would enter into – there are a lot of really interesting companies that we partner with.

Even though the world is moving very fast in terms of technology, I don’t think the skills that we as in-house counsel have to exercise have changed that much. It’s about your skills at client service, at understanding the big picture, and then being able to communicate to others, particularly non-lawyers, what that big picture is and how the pieces fit together. And then, of course, having really excellent contract and drafting skills, strong negotiation skills, and being a good issue spotter.

Legal departments are often viewed as cost centres, but that’s unfair, because the deal doesn’t close without a lawyer doing the contract. We limit losses – both in business deals and in litigation. As general counsel, we struggle on that side of innovation – how do we demonstrate our value in a world that’s very based on metrics? That’s why a lot of us use things like contract management systems, to show how many contracts we’re turning out, and how quickly we’re turning them out.

When I think about real innovation, a lot of that is just the everyday problem-solving that lawyers do. That’s where I think lawyers are actually more creative than often people give them credit for.

Looking forward at the role of general counsel, I expect that, given the brand reputation issues that companies are running into, there will be a greater emphasis on the role of the GC as that internal watchdog. I’m always wary of the word ‘compliance’ because I think it has this connotation that you’re a paper pusher, whereas I think what really is required of the role is excellent judgement and ethics. People are going to be looking for a GC who has a strong moral compass and an ability to read situations and pick up on things – to not just make sure that you’re following things by the book, but that there is not something that is actually ripping at the fabric of the organization, even if you have checked all the technical boxes.

It will be interesting to see how much more independence the GC role ends up having. The extent that it’s subordinate to some other executive roles may limit its ability to be the check in the balance of powers – so it will be interesting to see that evolve.

After I finished law school, I got very interested in cities and urban policy and I started working for the City of New Haven. There was a large, environmentally contaminated, abandoned site in my neighborhood and I got interested in trying to develop it. I worked on the site for about three years – first while I was working for the City of New Haven and then when I was a fellow at NYU School of Law, at the Furman Center, which is an urban policy think-tank. But really, I knew that this real estate project was the kind of entrepreneurial project I wanted to do.

I had known the founders of Genius through friends, and then after a couple of years, they were basically like, ‘Hey! We’ve got a million problems, want to come work here?’ It was a much smaller company at that point, about 15 people. We were also just beginning the process of liaising with the music publishers who administer the rights for songwriters – and who are our core strategic partners. That was not anything I had experience with at the time, but the founders and I knew each other well, we trusted each other and we liked working with each other, and they wanted me to give it a shot.

But of course, at the time, I knew very little about the music industry, or what really running a company looked like, and so there was a ton to learn. I joined right as the NMPA [National Music Publishers’ Association] was (rightfully) cracking down on copyright violations with lyrics. We were in the process of formalizing our licensing relationships and introducing ourselves to critical partners like music publishers and songwriters, so it was important to get out there and really let everyone know that we were trying do the right thing, that we wanted to be collaborators, that we wanted to be creative together and make what we do good for everybody in the equation.

The experience I had doing the development project in New Haven was some of the most valuable experience I had coming in to Genius. There were a ton of legal dimensions – environmental clean-ups, deals with the state, zoning negotiations, etc – but I always had to have the bigger picture in mind as well, which gave me a sense of what it meant to make a whole project work.

I learnt the importance of real relationships and talking and meeting – getting to know your counterparties. It just can’t be underestimated how important that is and how valuable and satisfying it is to realise that you’re dealing with interesting, talented people on the other end and that you can hopefully work together to do cool stuff.

My first title was actually general counsel, but my role immediately went beyond the job description because a company of 15 people doesn’t traditionally have a general counsel. So at the beginning, I was also running finance, HR and facilities operations. Over the years, and as the company has grown, I’ve helped establish key roles at the company, like managing our sales organization. I no longer oversee these departments – we’ve got much more talented folks managing HR, finance, facilities, and sales now! Now I focus on our core general strategic relationships – with our board, investors, music industry publishers and labels, and streaming services like Spotify. It had become all-consuming, so recently we hired a terrific director of business and legal affairs, reporting to me – and so legal is back in my orbit.

It’s important to me that I’m not the only person reviewing deals that I’ve been instrumental in creating, because that means that I’m too close to them. I definitely want other eyes on them and it’s always been that way; it’s always a collaborative process. But I think it’s definitely possible to wear many hats responsibly. I don’t think it’s wise to have a lawyer in an ivory tower who is in some world of abstraction, weighing in. We’re all realists to the point where we know that there isn’t just an answer that exists in an abstract space for questions of risk – you need more information and you need to trust your team to be able to handle that kind of complexity, and not fear that if your lawyer is too involved in the business side of things that they’ll somehow be compromised. I think it’s really the contrary – they will be better informed and will be able to make better decisions.

We have a company value here, which is to be skeptical of experts – and really don’t devalue your own ability to figure stuff out, and think there’s a monopoly on special knowledge. The way we operate here is really not attaching any mystery to the law or to contracts – when somebody wants to get a contract signed at Genius, they read it and they negotiate it and a lawyer doesn’t touch it until the point person at Genius feels that they understand it and feels good about it. The person who is trying to make a deal knows the most about what’s important to them and the company as a whole, and there’s no reason they can’t understand what they’re agreeing to, what they’re trying to get out of it and what the scope should be. I think it’s important that folks who have specialized training ultimately backstop this stuff but, at least in my world, there’s a trend towards the broadening of engagement with things that people typically think of as the work of lawyers.

In my mind, the most important thing has always been to really be connected to the company’s mission. When you’re trying to build your company and your business and establish what you’re going to be in the world, I think it’s really important that everybody – especially the folks who are empowered to say no to things and who are trying to manage risk – really understand what the company is trying to do and value that, and are not just taking the standard nervous lawyer approach.

At Genius, we’re always trying to innovate in the products we’re creating – we’re creating new formats. Annotating lyrics was new and, more recently, we have our Song Stories product, which tells you a story about a song as you’re listening to it. The experience is inspired by the Instagram or Snapchat story experience, but is built around a song. We’re super-excited about bringing the Genius experience to streaming services and all the places people listen to music. Trying to figure out the partners and the right structure of a deal, and making it scalable, takes some amount of thinking and creativity from all sides. Our legal team is constantly forced to be creative and think about products that have never been done before.

In the digital space, so much of the innovation that’s going on is around collaboration and the creative use of content that might be coming from lots of different sources. That inevitably means figuring out how to work together with other creative people and other creative companies, and that is going to require legal organizations that are built for that, and are part of that beyond simply being lawyers reviewing contracts – it’s going to take creativity.

For a lawyer that wants to be a creative and productive presence in an in-house role, I think the more aspects of the business you can expose yourself to – for us, that means technology, music, video production – the more useful you’re going to be. For folks who are interested in emerging companies, the more entrepreneurial activities you can engage in, the more you really get a sense of what it means to try to build something from scratch, which is an invaluable experience for a lawyer.

I was one of these people who actually did not have a burning desire to become a lawyer. I was much more interested in public service, politics and policy, and I decided that I needed to go to law school so that I could have a marketable skill if a career in public service didn’t work out. But I discovered, to my surprise, that I really enjoyed the law.

I spent the first part of my legal career as a federal prosecutor. After I left that, I ended up spending several years at a law firm where I learned civil litigation. But I always harbored my love for public service and so when President Obama asked me to join his administration, it was a great honor and a privilege to go back to the Justice Department, first as the head of the Civil Division (which is the largest litigating division at the DOJ, with 1,000 lawyers) and then eventually as the third most senior official in the Department.

When I was coming to the close of my time at the DOJ, I knew a few things. I did not intend to remain in the administration to the very end, and I didn’t necessarily want to go back to a law firm. When you’re the Associate Attorney General of the United States, that’s sort of like being the general counsel of the Justice Department. There’s a set of skills and talents which are transferable to being the GC of a large company.

It’s always helpful to have the perspective of the regulators and to understand what they are trying to accomplish. I think oftentimes we find ourselves operating in stereotypes – if you’re in the public sector you have stereotypes of what you think people in the private sector are like, and vice versa. The experience of being on both sides of that line helped me to appreciate that there’s actually a lot of common ground and a real opportunity for people to reach resolutions that are mutually acceptable, but also to work together in a very collaborative way.

The other thing that was helpful was the experience of managing a large organization with many competing interests and, of course, one filled with lawyers. Being able to figure out how I could be most effective in that environment was extremely helpful when I became the general counsel of PepsiCo. And it’s extremely helpful to me now.

The learning curve at PepsiCo was steep, because I had never been in-house before. I had never been a business partner before. That made it critical that I immediately learned the business as best I could – and that’s exactly what I did. I got very granular, talking to business leaders and business colleagues throughout the company.

There’s no substitute for really learning the business, because your value as a lawyer to your business colleagues is enhanced when you really understand the problems they’re dealing with from their point of view. I think it helps you to come up with more creative solutions, and it helps you to give them advice that is actionable and useful.

That’s exactly what I’m doing at Uber – spending a lot of time with my team, the business teams, and spending a lot of time in the field, in markets like Latin America, which is currently our fastest growing market.

The greatest thing about Uber is that this is a company that is like no other. It offers a job or an economic opportunity to more people around the world than any other company on the planet. That is an amazing reach. This business model is so robust, it is so widespread, it has its reach in so many corners of the world, that you become very aware of the public trust that you have – because so many people rely on your platform to either move themselves or their loved ones from A to B and so many people rely on this platform for economic opportunity. So many cities are increasingly relying on the data we have on our platform to help them make better planning decisions so they can become more sustainable places for their citizens to live and work. To be a part of that, to be an engine for that, and to be able to advise on the development of that is extraordinarily exciting.

The other thing that’s really extraordinary about this place if you’re a lawyer, is that you work on issues which, if they get themselves into the court system, almost inevitably become issues of first impression. It means you are forging the law, you are on the cutting edge of creating a legal framework for the gig economy – and for a lawyer, that is an incredibly exciting environment to work in.

One of the things that being at a company like Uber forces you to do is to look at the existing paradigm, the existing legal framework, and then think very creatively and innovatively about ways in which you can address the basic values that that framework is trying to protect and do it in a way that actually fits the reality of how people live and work.

For instance, something that’s at the heart of our business model is the independent contractor model – the question of whether Uber is an employer of drivers or whether those drivers are independent contractors. We’re all operating within a framework that was constructed for very good reason over a century ago, and the question – can we preserve the values that framework is seeking to protect, creating a safety net for individuals when they change jobs or decide to move to a work environment that allows them to value their time and their freedom and liberty and flexibility? – can’t be a false choice between flexibility and having an array of benefits or a safety net that will help people retire with dignity, that will protect them when they get sick. Being a part of really pushing that conversation and creating a new legal paradigm that fits today’s reality and today’s economy – being a lawyer at Uber gives you the opportunity to play a very significant role in that.

One of the things I’m most proud of here at Uber is that we were able to resolve what was our biggest private litigation, the Waymo case, so quickly. I think the fact that we were able to resolve that and the way we were able to do it not only demonstrates that we’re serious about turning the page on the way things operated and that we are serious about striking a new tone, but I think it also creates a path to greater collaboration and co-operation with a company that, just a month ago, was a big adversary.

One of the things I’m most proud of at PepsiCo is that we were able to really enhance our position as an ethical business leader while I was there. I’m excited about bringing some of the innovations and approaches that we developed when it comes to compliance, ethical leadership and integrity in the way that we do business from PepsiCo to Uber.

The other thing I’m proud about at PepsiCo is the work we did to enhance diversity in the legal profession. We were able to create incredibly diverse legal teams, because we know that when we bring diverse voices around the decision-making table we can make better business decisions, and I look forward to doing that here.

Particularly in technology companies, like this one, where there’s a premium placed on innovation and on speed, the general counsel role is extremely important. I always focus on the ‘counsel’ part. You cannot come to this role and think of yourself as a lawyer. You have to think of yourself as a counselor and partner who can provide legal advice – but also general counsel to your business partner on legal, business, policy and reputational issues.

I don’t think Dara [Khosrowshahi, CEO at Uber] has ever asked me what’s the law on this, or what’s the law on that. He needs to know my judgement and my approach – and that will be informed by my legal judgement, but what he’s looking for is counsel. That is really what I want all of my lawyers in the legal department to begin to think of themselves as – they are business partners who need to give sound counsel to their business colleagues – and if someone is interested in this role, that’s what they have to prepare themselves to do.

I worked for nine years with Ashurst (formerly Blake Dawson, and Blake Dawson Waldron before that when I joined in 2004) in Sydney, Australia. I spent the first year thinking I wanted to be an IP/IT lawyer, and I was actually contemplating leaving the law to study engineering. But I had a wonderful mentor who said to me, ‘The law is a big place, Aimie. There is a space for you here, you’re just not in the right pond.’ She helped me navigate moving within the firm – notwithstanding that was outside the usual process – and I spent some time in the banking and finance team. As soon as I got there, I was in my pond and I loved what I did. I spent the next eight or so years as a transactional banking and finance lawyer.

I went on secondment a couple of times – at RBS, Perpetual Trustees and Qantas – and each time I decided in-house wasn’t for me. I liked the purity of what I was doing, I liked the breadth of the work, and I worked for lots of partners. But then I got involved in a transaction in which Canadian ATM owner DirectCash Payments Inc was acquiring Customers Ltd, a publicly-listed company in Australia. The CEO at DirectCash was a very interesting character – I thought he was quite different in the way that he came at problems from quite obtuse angles. I spent 12 months working for him in private practice following the transaction, and then he asked me to work for him. I thought I could learn a lot from working directly with him, and that’s how I came to end up working in-house.

DirectCash was acquired by Cardtronics, and I fully expected that at the end of that process I’d be going home to Australia to find a job. But I got a phone call from the CEO of Cardtronics after we had signed the deal, and he said, ‘I’d like you to think about becoming our GC’. I think the most flattering place to be hired is from the opposite side of the table, and that is what happened. Cardtronics is a Nasdaq-listed plc and I’m an Australian-qualified lawyer, so it was something I thought long and hard about. I’ve never been one to shy away from a challenge, so I ultimately thought: why not?

I’m not qualified to advise on US, Canadian or UK law, so I have outside counsel and teams of local lawyers in the UK, the US, Australia and Canada. And to be candid, in the general counsel role, you can never be an expert. Somebody asked me once, ‘Why do you think the title is general counsel?’ And I said, ‘Because I spend my day counseling people generally!’ Really it’s about putting together the experts with the business when and where it’s needed.

When I first went in-house, I went from being an expert in everything related to debt financing and knowing all the market trends, to being asked questions about employment law and occupational health and safety that were completely outside my expertise set – businesses are dynamic, and there are a broad range of issues that cross your desk every day.

I very quickly realized that you have to get comfortable with no longer being an expert, and you’re going to know a little about a lot, instead of a lot about a little. I think to be successful in the GC role, you’ve got to be adaptable and you’ve got be prepared to think about things in ways you might not have contemplated before. You have your external firms to help you, but ultimately the business thinking around the risk has to come from you, so I think that adaptability is the core trait for successful GCs.

But it did take me a little bit of time to get to that place. As a banking and finance lawyer, I would feel like I had let someone down if I couldn’t give them the answer, because I’m supposed to be the expert in that field. But you can never have all the answers when you’re in-house. I carried a bag of insecurity around for the 12 months or so following the move in-house, and it took sitting down with the CEO I was working for and him saying to me, ‘You’ve got to check that bag – you don’t need to carry it around with you. We know you won’t have the answers immediately and the sooner you get comfortable with that, the better you will be.’ And really from that conversation forward, I checked that bag every day at the door, and trusted my judgement. Now I really enjoy getting the practical problems from the business and helping them try and solve those.

One of my proudest professional moments was when we announced the acquisition of CashCard by DirectCash in Australia on what was Friday Canadian time, Saturday Australian time, and DirectCash to Cardtronics before markets opened on the Monday. What seemed like an impossibility had become a reality. It took an enormous amount of effort from a very talented team, and was the culmination of a long sale process on the DirectCash side and acquisition process on the CashCard side. The difficult thing about being in a sale process is that you never know if the sale is going to go through, so you have to run the business and do the right thing for shareholders irrespective of what’s going on with that process, but you’re always mindful of it. That was a really interesting professional experience to have, especially as I had a daughter who was between one and two years old at that time, and I was flying around the world with her and my husband, trying to keep two sensitive transactions confidential.

I’m now in the process of building a team of internal lawyers who want to get their hands dirty on the work and don’t want to push everything externally. It’s very important that we know our business because our externals will only do as a good a job as the instructions that we give them. As an in-house team, if a matter has got business elements attached to it, you are the expert. If you engage with that mindset, the externals can help you produce a document which works. If you give something to an external without that context and without that input, you end up with poor outcomes. You’ve got to have a team of internal lawyers who want to get across the detail and understand the business drivers and business levers so that they can articulate what is it we as a business are trying to achieve in the context of the ask.

I wouldn’t say we have a formal panel of externals – I’ve just started recalibrating. The Cardtronics use of externals was very haphazard; there was no rhyme nor reason to it, so we’re going through a process of rationalizing who our externals are. But it’s not a hard and fast set of rules about who we can and can’t use.

In terms of innovation, my personal view is that you inherently need a person’s brain to run around all the various rabbit holes, and I’m not sure that you can really get to a place where that’s replaced by AI. I don’t think you can replace the lawyer in the dialogue when you’re sat around trying to figure out how the business can structure something which is efficient, compliant and workable from a business perspective.

That said, there are things that make our lives a lot easier. I’m in the process of getting a cloud-based document management system implemented. The expectations of the business are that the legal team produces high-quality documents, we have version control, and without a proper tool it’s very difficult to do that when you’re working in and across teams within the business.

We’re going to standardize as much of our business process as we can, including documentation, so that we can partner with the business to say, ‘Let us build a tool for you, but once we give it to you, we need you to work within its parameters; we’re not going to customize for every deal that we do.’ We need to have a legal team that can spend its time on the more complicated things and the more standardized business-as-usual deals get done on standard, approved paper.

But I’m a paper girl. I like to talk to people and I don’t like email, I prefer conversations over electronic dialogue, so I’m old-fashioned in that sense. I want my people more engaged with the business: talking to the business leaders, being on the calls, understanding what’s coming, being ahead of the ball rather than being reactive. Quite a lot of business incubates, so if we know that it’s incubating, we can be ahead of that curve. But you can only be ahead of that curve if you get out of your office, understand who the key business drivers and dealmakers are and get engaged with them so that you know what’s coming.

I have always been attracted to public service. A number of my colleagues from my time at Gibson Dunn had gone on to serve as solicitors general in state attorneys general’s offices. Those offices provide unparalleled opportunities, such as the chance to argue appeals and challenge areas in which the federal government has exceeded its powers and placed onerous regulatory requirements on the state. So I was very grateful to have been offered the opportunity to work in the West Virginia solicitor general’s office.

In 2017, I became the general counsel of the FCC. I’m primarily responsible for two components – reviewing Commission rules and orders to ensure they are legally sustainable, and defending those actions in court. I also oversee units that deal with fraud and bankruptcy issues, as well as various internal issues like employment matters. In West Virginia, I supervised four or five attorneys at any given time. Now, I oversee a team of more than 70 lawyers, so I’ve had to focus a lot more on learning how best to allocate my time, how best to delegate, and who are the best people to delegate various issues to.

I came into this position with very much a generalist understanding of administrative law and appellate law. And while I had done some communications work in the past, I definitely rely on staff to brief me on particular areas that require a lot of technical or substantive expertise. But one benefit of bringing a generalist perspective is that I’m in a good place to understand what sorts of questions and issues a judge might have and how they will approach reviewing a particular Commission action, and to ensure that what we’re doing is likely to be upheld in court.

I think the first few weeks in the role were probably the most challenging – you really inherit a whole world when you come into a federal agency, and so the early days are occupied with learning new names, learning people’s responsibilities, and learning the various practices and processes at the agency. Once you’ve had some time to reflect on that, then you can start to think constructively about what’s working, what’s not working, what you’d like to change and what you’d like to improve.

Along with one of the new deputies that came in with me, I spent a lot of our early weeks scheduling meetings, both with different team leaders from the office of the general counsel, as well as with our stakeholders in the agency. That meant they could put a face to a name and we could show that we could learn about what they were doing and also how we could improve the relationships between the office of the general counsel and other offices within the agency. We have tried to create an open door policy so that folks who have pressing issues can come to us directly. That’s the way in which we tried to immerse and integrate ourselves early on.

Oftentimes, the perception of a general counsel, whether it be in a federal agency or in the private sector, is of someone who has the unfortunate responsibility to say no a lot of the time, and that person takes on a reputation for impeding progress within an organization. I think that a GC certainly needs to be aware of the legal prohibitions, and there may be times when they need to say no, but that person should also think of themselves as a facilitator, to help further the agency’s mission consistent with the law. In the gray areas, the general counsel needs to be clear in articulating what the various legal risks are, but to also help the organization achieve its objectives.

Unlike in the private sector, we don’t have the option of using outside counsel to represent us for particularly challenging or time-intensive matters. That’s part of the challenge, but it’s also part of what makes the job exciting. At the FCC, we have our own in-house litigation division, so that’s different from some agencies, who rely exclusively on the Department of Justice to handle the cases that end up winding their way to court. It allows us to be more holistic in how we approach legal problems, evaluating at the outset whether the rules or the orders that we’re adopting are easily sustainable – with one eye towards what sort of arguments we can make if they are challenged in court.

Another consideration is that attorneys in private practice divide their time amongst multiple clients, but when you work for the government, your client is ultimately the people. This means there’s much more focus on how the positions you’re taking will serve the public interest as a whole – not only in the case in front of you, but also long after you’ve left office.

One benefit of being in a management position working for the state is that it allowed me to be a lot more entrepreneurial. The attorney general was very receptive to attorneys coming up with ideas of how best to further the state’s interest, even if that meant initiating a law suit in federal court to challenge federal rules as unlawful. Because we had a lot of authority and ability to think of creative solutions, there was also a lot of trying to stay on top of legal and political developments in the news and trying to ascertain how we could best further the agenda of helping the people of the state when the federal government passed a rule that could adversely affect their interests.

Another thing a general counsel in federal government can do is focus on institutional issues that will affect the agency – not only in your time – but also in the future. There are some perennial issues that agencies encounter, like: how do we fund our programs and activities, how do we manage documents and data collection preservation? While these are not issues that take up a majority of my time, they are mission critical, so they are opportunities to think through how to set processes and procedures in place that will be consistent with both our legal obligations but also introduce efficiencies into the organization so that future people who come into my position will benefit.

Looking ahead, the increasing complexity of the modern administrative state will mean that general counsel are going to need to be much more interdisciplinary and also conscious of what their counterparts are doing in other agencies. There are a lot of areas where agencies share jurisdiction, where jurisdictions overlap, where consultation is required by law, or where review is necessary before action can be taken. So it’s increasingly important for general counsel to know what those requirements are, who to call at other agencies to get things done, and who the different stakeholders in the process are.

I also think that keeping on top of technological developments is going to be important. The tools that lawyers are using to do their work are constantly evolving, and the role that social media is playing in government messaging is evolving. And in the private sector, with respect to a lot of the entities we regulate, oftentimes the law may not evolve quickly enough to catch up with technological change. These factors are going to present challenges for lawyers to exercise good judgement in determining how existing laws apply to new technological developments and unforeseen situations. The answer in a lot of these cases will be for the federal government to get out of the way of competition and technological developments that are occurring.

There are two pieces of advice that I would like to give other attorneys.

The first is to be flexible in your career path and open to taking risks when a new opportunity comes your way that excites you. I would never have believed it if you had told me a few years ago that I would be deputy solicitor general of West Virginia, and then general counsel of the FCC, but those opportunities have been both a really enjoyable and rewarding experience, and I would encourage other lawyers to do the same.

The second is that it’s really important to cultivate a reputation for integrity and excellence among your peers starting in law school, because those are the people who one day are going to be in a position to speak to your character and your qualifications if the right opportunity comes along.